APA interview formatting depends on whether the interview is personal, research based, or published, and each type follows its own rules.
When a paper includes an interview, APA style cares about one main question: can your reader access the interview, or is it private?
Once you sort interviews into those two broad groups, apa formatting for interviews becomes much easier to plan and carry out on the page.
APA Formatting For Interviews: Quick Overview
APA style uses the author date system with a matching reference list, but interviews sit slightly to the side of the usual pattern.
Personal conversations, emails, and informal interviews are cited only in the text, while published interviews follow the rules for the source where they appear.
| Interview Type | Where The Reader Finds It | APA Treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Informal personal interview you conducted | Not recorded or shared, only your notes | In text only as a personal communication, no reference list entry |
| Research participant interview in your own study | Transcript in an appendix or a secure archive | Quote as a participant, mention the appendix once, no personal communication label |
| Email, text, or message interview | Private inbox or message history | In text as a personal communication with initials, surname, and exact date |
| Interview in a newspaper or magazine | Print issue or news website | Cite like a newspaper or magazine article with a full reference entry |
| Interview chapter in a book or edited collection | Book on a shelf or e book | Cite as a chapter in an edited book with page range and publisher |
| Interview in a podcast episode | Audio platform such as a podcast app | Cite as a podcast episode with host, date, episode title, and URL |
| Interview on YouTube or another video site | Streaming video page | Cite as an online video with the uploader as the author and a retrieval link |
| Interview you publish on your own website or blog | Public web page under your name or your organisation | Cite as a web page or blog post with the interviewer listed as the author |
Core APA Interview Citation Principles
Three ideas sit behind apa formatting for interviews across all these cases.
First, every citation needs enough detail for a reader to trace the source where that is possible.
APA calls sources that readers can find and check retrievable and treats everything else as non retrievable material that lives only in the text.
Second, personal conversations and private messages give useful detail for your argument but do not appear in the reference list because nobody else can retrieve them.
APA now gives clear wording for personal communications, and the official personal communication guidelines spell out when to use that label and when to treat interview material as participant data.
Many university libraries echo the same rule: private interviews go into the text only, while published interviews follow the standard pattern for books, articles, audio, or video sources.
In Text Citation For Personal Interviews
Personal interviews are those you carry out to gather extra insight for a paper but that are not part of a formal research project with participants.
These include phone calls, face to face chats, email messages, and online calls where the content is not available to your reader.
Narrative And Parenthetical Formats
Personal communications in APA need three pieces of information inside the sentence or the parentheses.
- The initials and surname of the person you interviewed
- The phrase personal communication
- The exact date of the interview in Month Day, Year order
Use the most exact date you can supply; if you only know the month and year, that level of detail is still better than none.
In a parenthetical citation, the whole element sits at the end of the sentence, like this pattern: (J. Hernandez, personal communication, May 25, 2018).
In a narrative citation, the name moves into the sentence and only the date and label stay in parentheses, as in this pattern: J. Hernandez stated that the pilot study would continue through the summer (personal communication, May 25, 2018).
Personal communications never appear in the reference list, since no reader can pull up the conversation in an index or database.
Quoting Research Participants
In formal qualitative research, interviews with participants fall into a separate group from casual personal communications.
APA recommends using plain labels such as Participant one or Student three, then pointing once toward the place where the full transcript appears, like Appendix A.
After that first mention, you can quote and paraphrase the participant in your results and discussion sections without extra citations or a personal communication label.
Formatting Published Interviews In APA Style
When an interview is published or recorded in a form that readers can locate, APA treats it like any other retrievable source.
The exact format depends on where the interview appears, but the author date pattern, sentence punctuation, and reference list structure stay stable.
Interviews In Newspapers And Magazines
For news stories and feature articles built around an interview, APA uses the standard newspaper or magazine template.
The interviewer usually sits in the author position, the date follows in parentheses, then the title of the piece and the title of the outlet.
An in text citation might look like this pattern in a parenthetical form: (Garcia, 2023), with a full reference entry on the reference page.
Interviews In Books And Edited Collections
Interviews that appear as chapters or sections in books follow the same pattern as any other chapter in an edited volume.
You place the interviewer in the author slot, list the year in parentheses, add the chapter title, and then include the editor names, book title, page range, and publisher.
Audio And Video Interview Sources
Audio and video interviews, such as podcasts and online videos, count as non print media in APA style.
For interviews on platforms such as YouTube, the uploader sits in the author position, and the reference includes the date, the video title with a bracketed description such as Video, the site name, and the URL.
University guides on interview referencing, such as the University of Queensland APA interview guide, line up with the manual and give filled in examples for many formats.
APA Interview Formatting Rules For Different Assignments
Students often meet interview material in short reflection papers, full empirical reports, and stand alone profile pieces, and each one uses slightly different choices.
Short Essays And Reflection Papers
In a short essay where you spoke with one professional and want to share a few lines from that chat, treat the exchange as a personal communication.
Work the person into the sentence, give their role or relationship if it helps, then add the personal communication label and date.
Full Research Reports
Longer reports that use formal qualitative interviews with participants put more weight on transcript management and anonymity.
Later in the results and discussion sections, draw on short participant quotes to support each theme, using simple labels such as Teacher A or Parent B.
You still end the paper with a reference list that holds only published and retrievable sources, not the private exchanges with your participants.
Profile Assignments And Feature Pieces
Sometimes a writing course asks you to create a profile based on an interview that you later publish on a class site or public blog.
In that case, your own interview becomes a retrievable source, and you can follow the web page or blog post pattern that APA gives for online content.
Your name sits in the author slot, the publication date reflects the day you posted the piece, and the title states that the piece is an interview.
Table Of Sample APA Interview Formats
The next table turns the rules above into concrete patterns you can adapt, with one column for the situation, one for the in text citation, and one for the reference entry or note.
| Scenario | In Text Citation Pattern | Reference Or Note Pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Informal interview with a local expert | (L. Chen, personal communication, March 3, 2025) | No reference entry |
| Research participant in a qualitative study | Student three stated that the change felt sudden | Note once that full transcripts appear in Appendix A |
| Interview based news article on a website | (Garcia, 2023) | Garcia, M. (2023, April 2). Title of article. Title of News Site. URL |
| Interview chapter in an edited book | (Lopez, 2022) | Lopez, R. (2022). Title of chapter. In P. Singh (Ed.), Title of book (pp. xx–xx). Publisher. |
| Podcast episode built around an interview | (Patel, 2024) | Patel, S. (Host). (2024, January 15). Title of episode [Audio podcast episode]. In Podcast title. Production Company. URL |
| Interview video on YouTube | (The Science Lab, 2023) | The Science Lab. (2023, June 10). Title of video [Video]. YouTube. URL |
| Interview you publish on your own class blog | (Your surname, 2025) | Your surname, A. (2025, May 5). Title of interview post. Class Blog Title. URL |
Formatting Interview Quotations On The Page
Beyond citation details, APA interview formatting also shapes how the words from the interview look inside your paragraphs.
For published interviews in print or online, add a page number for quotes or a paragraph number for unpaginated web pages when you use direct quotations.
Short quotes under forty words stay inside quotation marks within a regular sentence, with the citation placed right after the closing quote where needed.
Longer quotes of forty words or more turn into block quotations, which start on a new line, run without quotation marks, and carry a half inch left indent.
Handling Edits And Omissions
Spoken language rarely lands on the page in a tidy form, so you may need to tidy filler words or repeat phrases while staying faithful to the meaning.
APA allows light editing for clarity, with square brackets signaling any additions you make and ellipsis dots showing that you have removed some words.
Protecting Confidentiality
When interviewees share personal stories or sensitive details, the way you format and label their words also carries an ethical weight.
Follow your ethics approval or class instructions on pseudonyms, and avoid mixing real names with coded labels inside the same project.
Quick Checklist For APA Interview Formatting
This closing checklist ties the strands together so you can run a last review before you submit your work.
- Sort every interview into personal communication, research participant, or published source.
- Use the personal communication label only for private, unrecoverable conversations.
- Place all retrievable interviews in the reference list using the correct template for that source type.
- Keep in text citations in the author date style and use clear narrative or parenthetical patterns.
- Format short and long interview quotes with the standard APA rules for quotation length and indentation.
- Check that your approach to APA interview formatting is consistent from the title page through to the reference list and any appendices.
- Keep fonts, spacing, and heading levels tidy throughout on every page.