How to Cite an Interview in APA 7

Before you can cite an interview in APA 7, you have to work out which of three kinds you have, because only one of them gets a reference list entry. A published interview is referenced as whatever it was published in. An interview you conducted yourself is a personal communication and appears in the text only. Quotations from your own research participants are not cited at all.

That three-way split is where almost every mistake comes from. Get it right and the formatting is straightforward.

Which kind of interview do you have?

Work through these in order. The first one that matches is your answer.

A published interview is one your reader can go and find. The University of Notre Dame Australia's APA 7 guide lists where these turn up: "magazines; newspapers; a radio broadcast or podcast episode; YouTube video; TV show or transcript of a video or audio recording." If it has a URL, a call number, or a shelf somewhere, it is published.

A personal interview is one you conducted and nobody else can retrieve. You phoned a practitioner, emailed an expert, sat down with a colleague. APA 7 calls this a personal communication and covers it in Section 8.9.

A research participant interview is one you conducted as part of the study you are writing up. This is the case people get wrong most often, and it has its own rule in Section 8.36.

Purdue OWL's page on non-print sources draws the same three lines and states the consequence plainly: only published interviews require a formal reference list citation.

The retrievability test is what the whole system rests on. A reference list is a set of instructions for finding a source. When nobody can follow those instructions, APA keeps the source out of the list and puts the attribution in your sentence.

The official APA 7 rule for a published interview

There is no "interview" reference template in APA 7. You use the template for the medium the interview appeared in, and the interview itself is just content inside that source.

So a podcast interview uses the podcast episode format. A magazine interview uses the magazine article format. A YouTube interview uses the YouTube video format. The manual's reference examples in Chapter 10 cover each of those source types, and the interview borrows whichever one applies.

One consequence catches people out. The person being interviewed is usually not the author. For a podcast, the host occupies the author position. For a YouTube video, the University of Auckland's APA 7 guide is specific: the "owner of the YouTube account" goes in the author slot, because that is what makes the video findable. The interviewee's name goes in your sentence instead.

Format for a YouTube interview:

Account owner. (Year, Month Day). Title of work [Video]. YouTube. URL

Example:

Education Scotland. (2016, July 15). Dylan Wiliam: Feeding on learning [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Ox5aoZ4ww

In the text that becomes (Education Scotland, 2016). If Dylan Wiliam is the person whose words you are using, name him in the sentence: "Interviewed by Education Scotland (2016), Wiliam argued that..."

Worked examples

1. An interview on a podcast

The host is the author. Use the audio podcast episode template, which our guide to citing a podcast in APA 7 walks through in full.

Host, A. A. (Host). (Year, Month Day). Title of episode (No. 42) [Audio podcast episode]. In Name of podcast. Production Company. URL

In-text: (Host, 2024). Narrative: "Speaking to Host (2024), the interviewee described..."

2. An interview in a magazine

Use the magazine article template. The writer who conducted the interview is the author, and the interviewee is named in your prose.

Writer, B. B. (Year, Month Day). Title of the article. Magazine Name, 12(4), 33-37. URL

3. An interview in a newspaper

Same principle, newspaper article template.

Reporter, C. C. (Year, Month Day). Title of the article. Newspaper Name. URL

4. An interview on YouTube

Covered above. The account owner is the author. Our post on citing a YouTube video covers the variations, including channels that post under an organization name.

5. An archived radio interview

A recording held in a named collection gets the interviewee in the author position, because the archive catalogues it under their name. The Auckland guide gives this template and a real example:

Interviewee. (Year, Month Day interviewed). Title of interview [Interview]. Name of Collection; Name of Repository. URL

Fyfe, R. (2021, September 28). Rob Fyfe: The challenges of getting business and government working together [Interview]. Nine To Noon Archive; Radio New Zealand.

In-text: (Fyfe, 2021).

6. An interview published inside a book

If a book collects interviews, cite the book, or the chapter if each interview is a separately titled chapter with its own attribution. Our book chapter guide covers the editor-and-chapter pattern.

7. An interview you conducted

No reference entry. In the text only:

(A. Tolliver, personal communication, September 15, 2021)

8. A quotation from your research participant

No citation of any kind. You say in the text that the quotation came from a participant, and you keep whatever confidentiality you promised.

The interview you conducted yourself

An interview you ran, for a paper that is not reporting it as original research, is a personal communication. It stays out of the reference list and lives in your sentence.

Give the communicator's initials and surname, the words "personal communication," and the most exact date you have.

Parenthetical:

(E. Robbins, personal communication, January 4, 2019)

Narrative:

T. Nguyen (personal communication, February 24, 2020) described the same pattern.

Note the initials. A reference list entry inverts the name and puts the surname first, but a personal communication is an in-text citation, so the initials come first and read in normal order.

The category is wider than interviews. APA groups emails, text messages, online chats and direct messages, telephone conversations, live speeches, unrecorded webinars, unrecorded classroom lectures, memos, letters, and messages from non-archived discussion groups under the same heading. The common thread is that your reader cannot go and get them. An unrecorded lecture is a personal communication for exactly this reason, while a recording posted to the course site is a retrievable work with its own format.

If your discipline uses footnotes for this kind of attribution, Purdue OWL notes the same information works there: "P. Smith (personal communication, November 3, 2019) also claimed..."

Quoting your own research participants

This is the rule that changed, and it is worth knowing why. Section 8.36 of the Publication Manual, covering quotations from research participants, is new to the 7th edition. Under APA 6 people routinely reached for the personal communication citation when quoting their interviewees. In APA 7 that is the wrong tool.

The reasoning is that participant data is your own original work. You are reporting it for the first time in this paper, so there is nothing to point the reader elsewhere for. Buena Vista University's APA guide puts it directly: participant quotations "do not require a citation in APA because you do not cite your own work."

What you do instead has three parts.

Say in the text that the quotations came from participants. A sentence like "One participant described the handover as rushed" does the work that a citation would otherwise do.

Format by length. Quotations under 40 words go in quotation marks inside your paragraph. Quotations of 40 words or more become a block quotation, indented below the text.

Keep your ethical commitments. Whatever you agreed with participants about confidentiality or anonymity governs how you name them. In practice that usually means a pseudonym, a participant number, or a role description. If you are writing this up as a thesis, our APA dissertation formatting guide covers how the results chapter handles extended quotations.

A participant who is also a public figure speaking on the record is a different situation, and you should ask your supervisor rather than guess.

Special cases

The messy ones, with what the manual actually supports.

The interviewee is the person you are quoting, but the host is the author

Common with podcasts and broadcast interviews. The reference stays under the host or account owner, and you put the interviewee in your sentence. Readers follow the name in your prose to the idea, and the citation to the recording.

You have no date for a personal interview

Give the most exact date you have. If you genuinely cannot establish one, that is a problem for the attribution itself, because the date is doing the work of identifying which conversation you mean. Check your own notes or the email header before falling back on a year alone. Our post on sources with no date covers the n.d. convention, though it applies to reference entries rather than personal communications.

Your interviewee asked not to be named

A personal communication citation is built from a name, so an anonymous source breaks the format. Describe the person by role in your sentence instead, and say why they are not named. Ask your supervisor or your ethics committee how your department wants this handled, because the answer is institutional.

The interview is a transcript in a repository

Treat it as published. The archived interview template above applies: interviewee as author, the collection and repository named, and a URL if there is one. A transcript in a university special collection is as retrievable as a journal article.

You are quoting an interview you found quoted in another paper

That is a secondary citation, and it has its own machinery. Our guide to citing a source you cannot find or access covers the "as cited in" form and, more usefully, how to track down the original first.

The interview is with an Indigenous Elder or Knowledge Keeper

APA 7 introduced a modified personal communication format for traditional knowledge shared orally. Purdue OWL's summary of the 7th edition changes describes it as including the person's name, their Indigenous group or nation affiliation, their location, relevant details, the words "personal communication," and the date, with no reference list entry. Practice varies by institution, and some Canadian colleges ask for a reference entry as well, so check your department's style sheet before you submit.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Putting a personal interview in the reference list. The most common error by a distance. It happens because every other source you have cited that day went in the list, so the hand keeps typing. The reference list is only for things a reader can retrieve.
• Using a personal communication citation for your own participants. This was acceptable practice under APA 6 and is now specifically ruled out by Section 8.36. If the interview is the data you are reporting, quote it directly and say it came from a participant.
• Making the interviewee the author of a podcast or video. The author slot holds whoever makes the source findable, which is the host or the account owner. The interviewee belongs in your sentence.
• Inverting the name in a personal communication. Initials first, surname second: E. Robbins, not Robbins, E. The inversion is a reference list convention and this is an in-text citation.
• Giving only the year for a personal communication. The full date is part of the format, because it identifies the specific conversation.
• Naming a participant you promised to anonymize. A formatting rule never overrides an ethics agreement.

Quick-reference table