Convergent Interviewing: A Strategic Approach in Action Research

Not all research problems arrive with a clear map. Sometimes, you’re exploring unfamiliar territory – an organization undergoing rapid change, a community grappling with a poorly understood issue, or a clinical setting where experts hold conflicting views. In these situations, a rigid, pre-planned questionnaire can actually work against you. This is where convergent interviewing (CI) proves its worth. Developed by Bob Dick at the University of Queensland in Australia, CI is a structured yet flexible qualitative research method that refines its own questions as it gathers data – making it especially powerful in action research, where the goal is not just to understand a problem but to actively work toward solving it.

What is convergent interviewing? 🔗

Convergent interviewing is a qualitative technique designed to explore complex issues through a series of in-depth interviews, where each round of interviews actively informs the next. Rather than entering the field with a fixed set of questions, the researcher starts with a single broad, open-ended question and allows the participant to guide the conversation. What makes this method distinct is what happens between interviews: the researcher systematically analyses the data collected, identifies points of agreement and disagreement among participants, and then uses those insights to sharpen the focus of the next interview.

According to the SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods, CI was originally created to address issues in under-researched areas, though subsequent researchers have demonstrated it is equally effective where knowledge gaps exist even in more familiar domains. Since its development, it has been applied across marketing, business, health, and the social sciences.

The core philosophy of CI is simple: let the data drive the process. Most questions – and even the sample size – are determined progressively, from one interview to the next, based on what the data reveals.

How the convergent interviewing process works 🔗

CI follows a structured cycle, even though the content of each interview remains largely unstructured. Here is how the process unfolds in practice.

Step 1: The opening question 🔗

Each interview begins with a single broad question – one that is deliberately kept free of specific content so that the participant’s own priorities and perspectives shape the conversation. The interviewer’s role in the early stages is mainly to listen, maintain rapport, and keep the participant talking – typically for around an hour. Bob Dick notes that maintaining strong rapport and minimising interruptions allows the content to be genuinely determined by the interviewee, not by the researcher’s assumptions.

Step 2: Post-interview analysis and probe development 🔗

After each interview (or each pair of interviews, when two interviewers are used), the researcher reviews what has emerged and writes a brief interpretive report. According to Dick, in the early stages this might be half a page of notes, growing more elaborate over the course of the interview programme as themes accumulate. The analyst then identifies which themes appeared in more than one interview and categorises them as either areas of agreement or disagreement.

• When there is agreement: The researcher tests whether that agreement is genuinely widespread by probing for exceptions in the next interview. For example, if two participants both say that staff morale is high, a probe question for the next interview might ask: “Are there any situations where staff morale has been a concern?”
• When there is disagreement: The researcher seeks to explain the discrepancy by probing for the conditions under which each view holds. Dick’s example captures this well: if some participants say planning is done well and others disagree, the probe might be “Some people feel planning is handled effectively; others don’t. What’s your view, and why do you think opinions differ?”

These probe questions are added to subsequent interviews and become more numerous and specific as the research progresses. Dick describes this as a convergence that occurs both within each interview (moving from open-ended to focused) and across interviews (as probe questions become progressively more detailed).

Step 3: Sampling and when to stop 🔗

CI favours a maximum diversity sample – deliberately recruiting participants with different perspectives, roles, and backgrounds. Interviewing people who are least alike in the early stages is a strategic choice: if agreement emerges even among very different participants, that agreement is likely to be robust and widespread.

The sample size is not predetermined. Researchers continue interviewing until stability is reached – that is, when agreements are consistent across participants and remaining disagreements can be explained. A published pilot study in the field of surgical design and simulation found that just five interviews were sufficient to reach stability, with each lasting between 30 and 60 minutes – demonstrating that CI can deliver meaningful insights from relatively small, carefully chosen samples.

Structured process, unstructured content 🔗

One of the most distinctive features of CI is the way it balances structure and flexibility. As described in research on the technique, CI combines key advantages of both structured and unstructured interviews. Unstructured interviews generate broad, rich data but can be difficult to compare and interpret across participants. Structured interviews are efficient but risk missing important issues if the questions were poorly designed from the start. CI resolves this tension by keeping the content unstructured – so participants raise what matters most to them – while making the process tightly structured through systematic analysis between rounds.

According to the SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research, this combination enables greater reflexivity throughout all phases of research. The researcher is not locked into a predetermined framework; instead, they continuously adjust their understanding in light of new evidence – a quality that makes CI particularly well-suited to complex or emerging research areas.

Convergent interviewing as action research 🔗

Action research is a methodology built around iterative cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. Its purpose is not merely to generate knowledge but to produce practical, real-world change. Convergent interviewing aligns naturally with this framework because both approaches treat data collection as an ongoing, reflexive process rather than a one-time event.

Flexibility in evolving situations 🔗

Action research projects frequently involve unpredictable, fast-moving contexts – community consultations, organisational change initiatives, healthcare quality improvements. In these settings, a rigid questionnaire designed at the outset can quickly become obsolete. CI’s data-driven structure allows the researcher to adapt interview questions in real time based on what is being discovered, keeping the inquiry relevant as circumstances evolve.

Early diagnosis before a full proposal 🔗

Dick describes using CI at the very start of action research engagements – before even writing a detailed project proposal – to build a preliminary diagnosis of the situation. After a small number of carefully selected interviews, the researcher can present a report summarising the key issues and then offer a more informed proposal for how the project might proceed. This makes CI a particularly efficient entry point into action research, reducing the risk of designing an intervention based on faulty initial assumptions.

Reaching saturation faster 🔗

The sequential structure of CI helps researchers reach saturation more quickly than many other qualitative approaches. Because each interview is explicitly designed to test and refine findings from previous ones, the process eliminates redundancy and focuses inquiry precisely where uncertainty remains. When multiple interviewers are involved, the discipline of comparing notes after each round ensures consistency in how emerging themes are identified and pursued.

Validating and interpreting existing data 🔗

CI is also useful when a team has already collected data through surveys or other means but is struggling to interpret the results. As Dick observes, a relatively small number of convergent interviews can help clarify and make sense of survey data that proved ambiguous or hard to act upon – another way CI serves as a practical diagnostic tool within action research projects.

Convergent interviewing vs. other qualitative approaches 🔗

It is worth briefly distinguishing CI from related methods. Rao and Perry (2003) compared CI to in-depth interviews, case research, and focus groups, and argued that CI is more appropriate than other qualitative methods for investigating under-researched areas where there are few established experts. Unlike grounded theory, which generally discourages early engagement with existing literature, CI actively encourages researchers to bring prior knowledge into the process from the beginning – helping them recognise emerging themes and build rapport with participants by demonstrating genuine familiarity with the subject area.

Focus groups generate data through group dynamics, which can suppress minority views. CI, by contrast, interviews participants individually and deliberately seeks out divergent perspectives through maximum variation sampling – ensuring that minority viewpoints are captured rather than drowned out.

Practical strengths and limitations 🔗

CI’s major practical strengths include its efficiency with small samples, its systematic approach to data analysis, and its inherent flexibility. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research notes that the method can also be carried out by a single interviewer, though some rigour is gained when two interviewers are involved, since they can compare interpretations and challenge each other’s emerging conclusions.

That said, CI does have limitations. It demands significant analytical effort between interviews, which can be time-consuming. The quality of the findings depends heavily on the researcher’s skill in developing meaningful probe questions and in resisting the urge to introduce their own assumptions into the open-ended phase. There is also a risk of premature closure – declaring saturation before all important perspectives have been explored – if the sample is not sufficiently diverse from the outset.

Used carefully, however, CI offers something relatively rare in qualitative research: a method that is simultaneously rigorous, flexible, and efficient – one that improves its own questions as it goes.

What do you think? In contexts where the problem itself is still poorly understood, should researchers always begin with an exploratory method like convergent interviewing before committing to a fixed research design? And how do you think the balance between researcher reflexivity and methodological consistency should be managed across a series of convergent interviews?

References

1. https://www.betterevaluation.org/methods-approaches/methods/convergent-interviewing
2. https://methods.sagepub.com/reference/sage-encyc-qualitative-research-methods/n69.xml
3. http://www.aral.com.au/resources/iview.html
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309313608_Convergent_interviewing_essentials
5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238326765_Convergent_interviewing_A_qualitative_diagnostic_technique_for_researchers
6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3693926/
7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/39709266_Convergent_interviewing_a_technique_for_qualitative_data_collection
8. https://methods.sagepub.com/reference/encyclopedia-of-action-research/n74.xml
9. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/13522750310495328/full/html