Elite Interviews and State Politics Research

Abstract

Elite interviews have long been a staple of state politics research. Improved information technology facilitates the use of elite interviews, but also underscores the need for attending to their design, operationalization, and analysis. This essay provides a framework for developing, conducting, and interpreting elite interviews, and suggests means to enhance the validity and reliability of findings by considering instrumentation, sampling, data collection, and transcript analysis.Elite interviews offer political scientists a rich, cost-effective vehicle for generating unique data to investigate the complexities of policy and politics (Dexter 1970). These advantages are particularly appealing at the sub-national level due to the abundance of and variation among subjects and the ready access to these subjects in the states. Given elite interviews' ability to generate highly reliable and valid data, they have long been a staple of state politics research (Reeher 1996;Beamer 1999;Jewell 1982;Morehouse 1998;Jewell and Whicker 1994).The utility and validity of information produced by elite interviews is dependent upon the analyst's research design. Poorly prepared and unstructured interviews can yield poor information and funnel an inquiry away from the primary research focus to a respondent's stream-of-consciousness thoughts and biased perceptions. To insure reliability, elite interviews must pay careful attention to question formats and wording, sampling, and the process of data collection and analysis. This essay addresses each of these issues, identifying ways to enhance the validity of elite interviews and the contribution they make to state politics and policy research.the purpose and format of elite interview

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