From Protocol to Practice: Teaching the Relational Practice of Interviewing in HCI Education

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Abstract
Qualitative interviewing is a foundational method in Human Computer-Interaction (HCI) research and a common component of methods education. Yet interview instruction is often framed around procedural competencies, developing protocols, minimizing bias, and ensuring ethical compliance, while the relational tensions that shape real interview encounters remain largely implicit. This provocation argues that interviews are not neutral data-gathering practices but socially situated interactions co-constructed through relational dynamics. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from qualitative methodology, feminist epistemology, and ethics-of-care research, we synthesize three relational dimensions of interview practice. These include power and positionality, emotional work, and ethics-in-practice, and demonstrate how interviews inherently involve negotiation, interpretation, and responsibility that exceed procedural models of training. Building on this synthesis, we propose pedagogical approaches for HCI education that make relational work explicit and teachable, including reflexive exercises that surface positionality and interactional dynamics, case-based analyses to cultivate emotional literacy, researcher-centered protocols, and structured rehearsals for ethical decision-making. Our aim is not to replace procedural instruction but to expand it by framing interviewing as both a technical and relational practice, inviting educators to reconsider how methods are taught and supported while bridging the gap between the formal curriculum of training and the hidden relational work that unfolds in practice.

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