Compare methods

	Life-History Interview	Key-Informant Interview
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2017	1979
Originator	Ethnographic interviewing tradition (codified by Bernard)	Ethnographic interviewing tradition (Spradley; codified by Bernard)
Type	In-depth, often multi-session chronological interview eliciting one person's whole life	Purposive in-depth interviewing of especially knowledgeable or well-positioned community members
Seminal source	Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421	Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421
Aliases	Life Story Interview, Biographical Interview, Personal Narrative Interview, Life-Course Interview	Key Informant Interviewing, Cultural Expert Interview, Knowledgeable Informant Interview, Specialized Informant Interview
Related	4	4
Summary	The life-history interview is an ethnographic interviewing technique in which the researcher elicits one person's whole life, told chronologically, usually across several extended sessions. The narrator recounts childhood, family, work, migration, turning points, and old age in their own words, and the resulting narrative is treated as both ethnographic and historical data. Analysis proceeds thematically — coding recurring topics and meanings — and narratively — attending to how the story is constructed, sequenced, and given significance by the teller.	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.