Andreas Witzel and Herwig Reiter. The Problem-Centered Interview: Principles and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012

Abstract

Germany has a long and rich tradition of qualitative social research (QSR) in sociology and neighboring disciplines. Since the 1970s, several schools have been established in this rapidly developing field. Until quite recently, access to the vast part of the methodological literature that emerged in this context had been available only for those who read German. However, the situation has started to change in the last decade. There is a growing number of publications in English which introduce the methodological innovations of German-speaking social scientists to a much broader public (Flick, Kardoff, and Steinke 2004; Knoblauch, Flick, and Maeder 2005; Bohnsack, Pfaff, and Weller 2010).
The book reviewed in this article is one of these publications. It provides a comprehensive, methodologically well-founded, and at the same time practically oriented introduction to the Problem-Centered Interview (PCI) approach, which has been developed by one of the authors, Andreas Witzel, since the 1970s.