Interview with Elite: Opportunities and Challenges

Interview is one of the well-known methods of qualitative data collection. Today, the interview is considered as an interactive practice. In recent decades, social scientists has increasingly considered the role elite play in the production of qualitative data and also, doing interview with these people in the community, and methodological issues about interviewing them have been interested by scholars.       

This review study was conducted through a systematic search in the field of interview, and interview with elite, in literature published between 1980 and 2018, by search engine/ database Google Scholar, ISI Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus Sciencs Direct, using the selected keywords. Finally, 44 articles and 2 books in this field, all in English, were retrieved, reviewed and evaluated.

This review study includes the definition of elite, the benefits and interviewing, the role of power in interviewing, approaches and preparation, and challenges in interviewing with organizational elite and some strategies to guide the interview. The overall purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to researchers who have recently wanted to interview elite.

An interview with the elite can play an important role for many researches that have portrayed the history and development of a phenomenon over the past half century. By gaining experience, an interviewer can learn techniques that overcome these problems and turn the challenges into an opportunity that results in better quality interviewing.