I intend to be interviewing a number of representatives from the NSW Aboriginal Land Council throughout my thesis and am concerned with the time constraints of an interview. I am conscious in avoiding becoming a nuisance to the Land Council as there are multiple persons needing to be interviewed.
There is no standard or fixed time for semi-structured interview, it depends on the questions. In your case, the best thing to do is to do pilot for the interview and to assess how long it will take. Then, it will be comfortable and convenient for you and for the Council members to know the approximate time of the interview in advance. Good luck
Have you looked into cognitive interviews (very specific) or ethnography (very general)?
Thank you, what great ideas! I will most definitely do a pilot/test run of the interview so that I can prepare the council (and myself) for the expected time length.
The common wisdom suggests one hour to an hour and a half, but I have no idea what the basis for that is.
In your case, it could well be that asking experts about their area of expertise will lead to longer interviews, simply because they want to talk about the wide range of things that are important to them. So the safest strategy is probably to ask for an hour and a half of their time, and work hard to make sure that your topics of interest do get covered in that time frame.
As people have said, there is no hard and fast rule, and common wisdom is 1-1/2 hours. In my (extensive, though not necessarily well done) experience, it depends on who you're interviewing, what sort of rapport can be built and what you're looking for from the interviews. If you're very focussed in what you intend to report (e.g. qualitative interviewing as an adjunct to market research) then half an hour may be plenty, or even less, but you'll want correspondingly more interviews, I think, and you'll never be sure that people really relaxed and became 'conversational' rather than 'interview subject'. If you're doing grounded theory with a firm commitment to try to discover the informant's underlying categories rather than in any sense imposing your own and the literature's, or if you're sampling discourse, then really the longer the better, within the limits of theoretical saturation (the informant is repeating self and you're getting bored). You'll find on the whole that busy professionals and administrators, particularly if cast as 'senior to you', will be impatient to finish, and unless you can manage to set up a conversation - two professionals together, sharing experience - you'll be lucky to get half an hour, and they'll never relax from answering questions to start 'talking to themselves' to you. Children have short attention spans and 15 or 20 minutes may be all you can sustain, in which case repeat interviews may be the way to go. (Children are difficult in any case - they language-games they play frequently involve not contradicting adults, so they can be apparently very suggestible).
Best wishes.
I have experience in conducting semi structured and structured interviews with policy makers and interest groups. I ask for an hour, and this is normally all that policy makers will give, whereas the latter are generally happy to talk (and talk). For me the interview duration is rarely a problem, but keeping the interviewee on track can be. The guys that say they can only manage half an hour, invariably talk for an hour, but I think are less likely to drift off topic. I find that the biggest challenge is to build a sufficiently good rapport that then enables me to probe on the more interesting and invariably sensitive issues.
Good luck
Pretest your questions in a pilot exercise, define the key questions (no more than 6), be attentive in new topics of interest, try to rad the body language, and take time to reflect on the conversations before comeback to search deeply any issue.
The semistructured interviews should take atleast 30 min to 50 minutes.