Article How Many Interviews Are Enough to Identify Metathemes in Multisited and Cross-cultural Research? Another Perspective on Guest, Bunce, and Johnson’s (2006) Landmark Study Ashley K. Hagaman 1 and Amber Wutich 1 Abstract There is much debate over the number of interviews needed to reach data saturation for themes and metathemes in qualitative research. The primary purpose of this study is to determine the number of interviews needed to reach data saturation for metathemes in multisited and cross-cultural research. The analysis is based on a cross-cultural study on water issues conducted with 132 respondents in four different sites. Analysis of the data yielded 240 site-specific themes and nine cross-cultural metathemes. We found that 16 or fewer interviews were enough to identify common themes from sites with relatively homogeneous groups. Yet our research reveals that larger sample sizes—ranging from 20 to 40 interviews—were needed 1 School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA Corresponding Author: Ashley K. Hagaman, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, PO Box 872402, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA. Email: hagamana@gmail.com Field Methods 1-19 ª The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1525822X16640447 fmx.sagepub.com by guest on April 30, 2016 fmx.sagepub.com Downloaded from