Compare methods

	Key-Informant Interview	Genealogical Method
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1979	1910
Originator	Ethnographic interviewing tradition (Spradley; codified by Bernard)	W. H. R. Rivers
Type	Purposive in-depth interviewing of especially knowledgeable or well-positioned community members	Systematic field procedure for collecting and reconstructing kinship genealogies
Seminal source	Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421	Rivers, W. H. R. (1910). The genealogical method of anthropological inquiry. The Sociological Review, 3(1), 1–12.
Aliases	Key Informant Interviewing, Cultural Expert Interview, Knowledgeable Informant Interview, Specialized Informant Interview	Genealogical Method of Inquiry, Pedigree Method, Kinship Genealogy Collection, Rivers Method
Related	4	4
Summary	The key-informant interview is a purposive in-depth interviewing technique in which the ethnographer works closely with a small number of especially knowledgeable or well-positioned community members rather than a representative sample. Key informants are people who, by experience, role, or position, can articulate cultural knowledge a typical member could not. The method centers on selecting such people well, building genuine rapport, eliciting their expertise through ethnographic questioning, and cross-checking what they say against other informants and observations to guard against bias.	The genealogical method is W. H. R. Rivers' systematic procedure for collecting kinship genealogies in the field using a small, fixed set of questions and the community's own kin terms. By asking each informant a standard sequence — who are your parents, your siblings, your spouse, your children, and so on — and recording named individuals together with the relationship terms applied to them, the ethnographer accumulates concrete pedigrees. These pedigrees are then assembled to reconstruct descent, marriage, residence, and the broader principles of social organization.