Key-Informant Interview
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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. · ISBN 9780759112421
- Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. · ISBN 9780030444968
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.