In this article the problem of standardisation in geographical research is reviewed by focussing on one episode of standardised social scientific research, namely the street interview or respectively the face-to-face delivery of a questionnaire in a public space. The central aspect of the paper is a detailed inquiry into a corpus of video data showing researchers investigating how people perceive comfort in open urban spaces by means of a questionnaire used in ad hoc street interviews. Constitutive features of standardised interviewing are described by carefully examining the front end of a chosen interview. Using detailed transcriptions and video stills of this episode, the article shows how an interviewer establishes contact with passers-by and prepares to start asking questions. I argue that the analysis of interaction between interviewer and respondent are necessary to circumvent the qualitative/quantitative debate, and to understand social scientific and geographical cultures of measuring and standardisation.