This article examines the sociolinguistic interview as a technique for collecting personal experience narratives for sociolinguistic analysis. My aim is to try to answer the main critiques that this data collection technique has received and to present concrete cases that corroborate its importance. The data provided allows to prove that the findings concerning these narratives do not depend on the scenario in which they are generated. This is why Labov and Waletzky's (1967) and Labov's (1972) narrative structure is generally used for the construction of any personal experience narrative.