Two People Walk Into An Interview… An Intro To Dyadic Interviews For Evaluators
October 2025
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Have you heard of dyadic interviews before? I hadn’t, until I realized I had already conducted a few myself!
Dyadic interviews are a data collection method that involves a conversation with two participants (and an interviewer). This is still a relatively underutilized method in evaluation, but it offers unique benefits and considerations.
Much of what I’ve learned about dyadic interviews comes from David L. Morgan’s book, Essentials of Dyadic Interviewing. I highly recommend checking it out if you’d like to dive deeper into the topic! It’s a fantastic resource, and I’ve drawn on it throughout this article. I’ve also added my own reflections and adaptations from a practical evaluation perspective to help make the method approachable and relevant to your work!
What is a dyadic interview?
Put simply, dyadic interviews are interviews with two participants instead of just one. They can also be called joint interviews, paired interviews, conjoint interviews, and two-person interviews.
Dyadic interviews can be especially useful for surfacing shared experiences and exploring how people interact around a topic. As such, this method has been most commonly used in research related to health, families, and psychology, often with existing pairs such as couples, individuals with their caregivers, or parents and children. They’ve also been used with coworkers, friends, and strangers, though it’s less common.
Why use dyadic interviews?
What are the benefits?
Based on my own experiences and Morgan’s descriptions, dyadic interviews offer a number of benefits as a data collection method for evaluation:
Rich data: Unique insights can emerge as participants compare their experiences, challenge each other, build on the other’s responses, and identify common threads; Morgan calls this process “sharing and comparing.”
Deeper answers: When someone else in the room shares their context or experience, participants often go beyond vague statements or surface-level answers, providing illustrative stories, examples, and specific details.
Detailed responses: Participants can bounce ideas off each other, clarify comments, and add details or examples that the other may have missed.
Diverse interpretations: Participants might interpret and answer interview questions slightly differently, providing a more complete picture.
Comfort and openness: The conversational setting can feel more casual and less hierarchical, shifting some of the control away from the interviewer and towards the participants.
Help and support: Participants might respond with supportive words, help each other articulate their thoughts, or remind each other about events or details.
Expanded perspectives: You might include participants who wouldn’t have been included individually.
Time saved: In my experience, conducting a dyadic interview can save time compared to doing two individual interviews, because you only go through the introduction and consent process once.
What are the challenges?
Dyadic interviews share many of the same challenges as focus groups, such as scheduling difficulties, moderating tricky group dynamics, and social-desirability bias (where participants provide answers that will make them look good, rather than answering truthfully).
Dyadic interviews also introduce some unique challenges to be prepared for:
Shared knowledge: You might get “left out of the loop” if participants reference inside jokes, jargon, or shared history. If this happens, don’t be afraid to play the fool and ask for clarification!
Disclosure dynamics: Discussing personal topics with someone else can be vulnerable. Some people might hold back, others may feel more comfortable opening up, and some may even end up sharing more than they intended. When participants have a pre-existing relationship, disclosures during the interview can also impact the relationship long after. Communicate proactively about this and be ready to steer the conversation to a different topic if needed.
Confidentiality risks: The presence of another person changes what confidentiality means in a dyadic interview. Be upfront about this in the consent process. Let participants know that while you’ll treat the interview as confidential, you can’t control what the other person may share afterward. Encourage participants to respect each other’s privacy by not sharing anything said in the interview with others.
When should you use dyadic interviews?
When dyadic interviews work best
Dyadic interviews are especially useful when:
Participants have shared experiences, knowledge, or interests.
The participants know each other and get along well.
The participants will be curious to hear and learn from each other.
Participants are likely to enjoy discussing the topic.
The interview will focus on a project or task the participants collaborated on.
A focus group isn’t feasible (e.g., can’t find a time that works for a group, or there’s only two participants).
You’re specifically exploring pair dynamics/interactions or collaboration.
The interview questions are unstructured or semi-structured, allowing for natural conversation.
Morgan emphasizes that in dyadic interviews, the richness of the data is closely tied to how well the participants engage with each other, so it’s essential to give the pairings some thought. In particular, it’s worth considering whose perspectives you are interested in, and how that might be impacted by someone else’s presence. For example, if you’re considering interviewing a mentor and a mentee, are you exploring the experience of being a mentor, or their shared journey? This can help guide your decision to use a dyadic format.
When dyadic interviews might not be the best fit
While dyadic interviews have many strengths, they’re not always the right choice. They may be less effective or even problematic when:
Participants have little in common (e.g. in terms of shared experiences, shared vocabulary).
Participants aren’t likely to get along or might be adversarial or competitive.
Participants don’t know each other and are likely to have conflicting views.
Power dynamics between participants could influence responses (e.g., an employee and a supervisor).
The topic is sensitive or deeply personal.
The topic is highly technical.
You’re specifically seeking individual stories and insights.
You need to cover a lot of structured questions in a limited time.
How do dyadic interviews compare to other methods?
It can be helpful to understand a new method in relation to others you might be more familiar with. Morgan describes how dyadic interviews stack up against individual interviews and focus groups.
Compared to individual interviews
Compared to interviews with a single individual, dyadic interviews differ on several fronts:
Time allocation: Individual interviews provide the full time to one participant, while dyadic interviews require the time to be shared between two participants.
Scheduling: Coordinating three calendars (two participants and an interviewer) can be more challenging.
Interaction complexity: Dyadic interviews involve interaction between the two participants, adding layers of rapport and dynamics that the interviewer cannot fully control.
Moderation: While the focus of facilitating individual interviews is building rapport with participants, facilitating dyadic interviews might also involve stepping back to let the conversation flow, fostering interaction, or encouraging a quiet participant.
Data depth: Dyadic interviews can yield richer data through shared storytelling, while individual interviews offer different probing opportunities.
Disclosure dynamics: Participants may feel more or less comfortable sharing in front of another person, depending on their relationship.
Compared to focus groups
More than just a “mini focus group,” dyadic interviews diverge from focus groups in a number of ways:
Time allocation: With only two participants, each has more opportunity to speak than in a larger group.
Coordination: Recruiting and scheduling two people is simpler than organizing a full group.
Structure: Focus groups are often more structured, with active moderation. Dyadic interviews tend to flow more naturally, with less probing.
Group dynamics: Focus groups can sometimes end up driven by dominant voices or groupthink, while dyadic interviews may offer a more balanced conversation, giving both participants more time and space to share.
Applications in evaluation
In my own experience at Three Hive, dyadic interviews have worked well in our evaluations when there are natural pairs who are comfortable having a discussion with each other.
For example, we used a dyadic interview when two staff members had worked closely together, planning and implementing a pilot program. Interviewing them together gave us a much richer understanding, as they reminded each other of details, questioned each other, and made sense of the process in real time.
In other projects, we’ve welcomed program managers to invite a frontline/program staff member from their team to join their interview. I’ve found that including both strategic and frontline perspectives can give a more layered understanding of areas for improvement and impact.
Another time, two clients were able to compare and reflect on their experiences accessing a program, highlighting shared challenges they had both faced. They also provided words of support to each other when speaking about difficult topics.
Tips for conducting dyadic interviews
Be clear and upfront: Make sure participants know they’re signing up for a dyadic interview—that’s not the fun kind of surprise! Communicate this before they’ve signed up for an interview and let them know why they were paired (e.g., because of their similar roles, their participation in a program, etc.).
Prepare carefully: Take time to understand the context and the relationship between participants before the interview. This can help you decide who to pair, tailor your questions to shared experiences, and anticipate how the dynamic might unfold. Preparation also helps you moderate more effectively: knowing what the two have in common (or where they differ) equips you to guide the conversation, probe meaningfully, and manage any tension or imbalance.
Communicate about confidentiality: As discussed above, you’ll want to be especially transparent about confidentiality and disclosures when conducting dyadic interviews. Morgan offers some helpful language to use, and I’ve adapted it here to provide some sample language that could be used in an email inviting participants to an interview:
The interview will involve you and one other [participant/staff member/client]. While the interviewer will treat everything shared as confidential, please be aware that the other person will also hear what you say, and we can’t control what they choose to share outside of the interview. I ask that you please respect each other’s privacy by not sharing what’s discussed outside of this conversation. Still, the best way to protect your privacy is by not sharing anything you wouldn’t want others to know.
Plan your questions: You may need to use different types of questions than in an individual interview. Open-ended questions and those that encourage interaction and comparison tend to work best. For example, you might ask, “What kinds of challenges did you each encounter when leading a session?” or “What was it like collaborating on the project together?” Morgan mentions several question approaches that can be effective in dyadic interviews:
Get-acquainted questions (initial questions that explore the common ground participants might have)
Funnel (starting with broad questions and moving to more specific ones)
Storytelling (asking participants to share a story about a topic)
Grand-tour questions (where participants talk through a regular activity or specific experience)
Encourage interaction: Initially, participants may tend to direct their answers to the interviewer rather than to each other. Use probing questions to encourage participants to interact with each other. For instance, you could ask, “Would you add anything to that?” or “Was your experience similar or different?”
Strive for balance as the interviewer: When there are two participants, it’s important to be intentional about how you respond to their contributions to avoid sending unintended messages. For example, commenting “That’s a great point!” in response to one participant could be perceived as “taking a side.” It’s hard to respond in equally enthusiastic ways to every contribution in an interview, so instead, Morgan suggests aiming for neutral responses that acknowledge without adding an opinion, such as nodding or smiling.
Final thoughts
Dyadic interviews might not be the most common method in evaluation, but they offer a lot of potential. Whether you’re exploring shared experiences, team dynamics, or collaborative work, this method can open up new avenues for richer data and deeper understanding.
I’ve found that even just thinking about dyadic interviews has helped me reflect on how relationships and interactions shape the way people talk and share, even in individual interviews and focus groups. I hope this article helps you see the possibilities of dyadic interviews, and maybe even inspires you to try them out in your own work!