In the latest issue of The Sociological Quarterly, 49(2), Raymond M. Lee examines a thread in the history of interviewing.

For a decade beginning in the late 1940s, David Riesman, with a variety of collaborators, produced a sustained body of work on the methodology of the interview. This article looks at Riesman’s writing on the interview. It explores the relationship between this work and Riesman’s initial development as a sociologist, examines how he and his collaborators viewed the interview as a method, and assesses the relevance of Riesman’s work to contemporary understandings of the interview as a research method.

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