Interviews invariably involve negotiation between the interviewer and interviewee, either for the interview as a whole or in connection with individual questions, or both. Researchers have to strike a balance between respecting subject preferences regarding topics, sequence, question and answer formats, and so on, and focusing the interview around questions of primary interest to the researcher. To meet standards of good research, researchers have to ask questions that are most likely to generate the data a particular study requires, but to meet ethical standards for studying human subjects, interviewees must feel free to not answer questions that they don’t want to answer, or to terminate the interview at any point.

Interview Sample A1: Negotiating the scope and format of an interview
A page from an interview with a 6th grade boy. The boy negotiates with the interviewer about what topics the interview will cover.

See also:
Protecting human subjects for a more complete discussion of the ethical issues involved in interviews and field observation
Wagner, Jon. “The unavoidable intervention of educational research” for a more complete discussion of researcher-subject cooperation