In this chapter, we provide an in-depth history of the debate over using semi-structured interviews to study motives in sociology. By doing this, we provide an overview of why critics argue that semi-structured interviews are insufficient for studying people’s motives. We begin by providing a brief overview of the issue and recalling the introduction. We then launch into the review by covering the work of C. Wright Mills in the 1940s that developed the idea of “vocabularies of motives.” This conception then became the foundation for sociological rejections of the use of semi-structured interviews to study motives. Next, we cover the work that emerged in the wake of Mills, such as scholarship that framed “talk” as “accounts” and reaffirmed Mills’ critique. Next, we delve into the contemporary rejections of semi-structured interviews to study motives. First, we cover work by Ann Swidler and other qualitative sociologists who reject using semi-structured interviews to study motives. Then, we discuss the peak of the critiques by covering how, in the 2010s, qualitative scholars rejected the use of semi-structured interviews to study motives. Third, we discuss resistance to this narrative within qualitative research. For example, we provide an overview of crucial work by Viterna on women’s participation in the guerrillas during El Salvador’s Civil War, and literature in social psychology on individuals who rescued refugees, many of them Jewish, during the Holocaust, such as Oliner. This research then created the foundation for subsequent work that used semi-structured interviews to study motives. Finally, we discuss pushback by theorists and qualitative scholars in the late 2010s and early 2020s that opened the door to this use of ethnographic data and semi-structured interviews, such as by Winchester and Green and Small and Cook.