So you have decided to conduct a pair-interview, yay hooray! In the following primer, you can read more about the mechanics of how to set up and conduct a pair-interview. To determine if pair-interviewing is right for you, we invite you to consider the following questions:

  • Will this be your first time conducting interviews?
  • Are your interview questions fuzzy or exploratory and open-ended?
  • Will reflection play a large role in your analysis?
  • Do you enjoy working with other researchers?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then pair-interviewing may be right for you! On this page, we define pair-interviews more precisely and offer reasons to motivate using the pair-interview technique in your next study.



What is a pair-interview?

Pair-interviews are interviews conducted by two people (as opposed to one person). In an interview there are a few things that the interviewers must keep track of, like: the passing of time, what the participant says, understanding the participant well enough to know how to respond, taking notes, keeping track of the remaining questions that need to be asked, and determining whether or not the interview is staying on track…(it’s a lot, we know 🤯)

Luckily, when there are two interviewers, these responsibilities can be split across two people.

Across our survey, we saw a delineation of two different roles, which we call the driver and the navigator.

  • 🚗 The driver is responsible for engaging with the participant, driving the interview forward like a conversation by asking the core interview questions from the interview script.
  • 🧭 The navigator is responsible for keeping the interview on track by actively listening to the conversation, offering follow-up questions that the driver may miss, or suggestions to move on if the conversation goes off track or time is running out.

In our experience, the lead student author usually took the driver role, with their colleague taking the role of navigator. In previous work, this was done differently, where the interviewers alternated roles across interviews.

Who should pair-interview?

Anyone can conduct a pair-interview, all you need are two people who are interested and willing to conduct interviews. We say more regarding this in the How do you pick a partner? section.

Insight 💡
pair-interviews are particularly helpful for researchers who are new to interviewing. Our collective experience has shown that pair-interviewing is beneficial in many ways.
  1. Capturing content: with a second interviewer, you have two people paying attention to the interview. This means that if one person misses something that a participant says, it is highly likely that the other person will catch it.
  2. Provides emotional support: Let’s face it, some days are not always your best – you either didn’t sleep well, or you had another deadline – so your head game is not where you would like it to be for your interview. With a pair-interview, you can distribute the responsibility, and switch off the roles between the driver and the navigator.
  3. Logistical support: There are many things to keep track of during an interview — the interview questions, responding to a participant, keeping track of time, and coming up with a follow-up question — pair-interviewing distributes the responsibility of some of these logistics. Often, the navigator will track the time and keep the interview on track. This frees up the mental load for the driver to fully pay attention to the participant and their responses.