I’ve been thinking about interview lengths this week (yes my life really is that exciting)…. It’s always a difficult one when you arrange an interview with someone – how long do you book the room for? Can you make plans afterwards? How long do you tell the participant it is going to take? You don’t want to scare them off by suggesting a 2 hour interview is on the cards, but neither do you want them to have to regretfully call it quits after half an hour because they need to dash off to work or whatever. Plus, the reality is, you really just don’t know how long each interview is going to last, particularly with projects such as mine – the interviews are in-depth, semi-structured and quite participant-led. I use a lot of prompts and follow-ups to probe what the young women are saying, so it really can be difficult to predict how long the whole process will take. A lot of it depends on what – and how much – my participants want to say to me. I aimed originally for ‘about an hour’ in terms of length, and this is what I tend to say to participants in advance too. So I decided to see just how accurate that had turned out to be… And guess what?! I was right on the money, so it would seem! After 20 interviews, my average interview length is exactly 59 minutes. There is a fair bit of variation within that of course, with the shortest being 35 minutes, and the longest 1 hour 45 minutes. So perhaps we can make a rough estimate, embracing the fact that some interviews will be much longer than this, and others much shorter. Although having said this, the motto of fieldwork should probably always be ‘expect the unexpected!’…