Clearly, interviewing is a formidable – although highly enjoyable – task for which a high degree of intellectual and social skill is required. At any one time you may be: listening to what the interviewee is currently saying and trying to interpret what they mean; trying to work out whether what they are saying has any bear- ing on ‘what you really want to know’; trying to think in new and creative ways about ‘what you really want to know’; trying to pick up on any changes in your interviewees’ demeanour and interpret these, for example, you may notice they are becoming reticent for reasons which you do not understand, or if there is more than one interviewee there may be some tension developing between them; reflect- ing on something they said 20 minutes ago; formulating an appropriate response to what they are currently saying; formulating the next question which might involve shifting the interview onto new terrain; keeping an eye on your watch and making decisions about depth and breadth given your time limits. At the same time you will be observing what is going on around the interview; you may be making notes or, if you are audio or video tape-recording the interview, keeping half an eye on your equipment to ensure that it is working; and you may be deal- ing with ‘distractions’ like a wasp which you think is about to sting you or your interviewee, a pet dog which is scratching itself loudly directly in front of your tape recorder microphone, a telephone which keeps ringing, a child crying, the fact that your feet are aching, you are tired and too hot, and so on.
How might qualitative interviewers prepare for such a challenging set of tasks? First, it is vital that researchers work on developing the skills they need to

handle the social, intellectual and indeed practical elements of these kinds of inter- actions, and on preparing for their interviews, rather than assuming that these are attributes which they either do or do not have already. It is possible, for example, to practise the following: