The Relational Interview: A Multi-Stage Qualitative Method for Capturing Relationally Produced Experience

This article introduces the relational interview, a qualitative method for studying experiences that are jointly produced, relationally negotiated, and distributed across social relationships. Conventional qualitative interviews treat individuals as discrete units of knowledge, limiting analytic access to relational processes such as narrative alignment, divergence, silence, and revision. The relational interview addresses this limitation through a structured three-stage design: an initial individual interview, a dyadic interview, and a follow-up individual interview. Grounded in relational epistemologies and narrative approaches, this sequencing allows researchers to trace how personal accounts shift through interaction and reflection, generating forms of data that single interviews cannot capture. The article focuses explicitly on methodological contribution rather than substantive findings. It outlines the conceptual rationale for relational interviewing, details the structure and sequencing of the method, and discusses analytic strategies and ethical considerations specific to interviewing across relational units. The relational interview expands the qualitative methodological toolkit by offering a systematic approach to studying lived experience as relationally produced.