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August 30, 2006
a little more on interviews. emphasis on the "little"
Brenner, Michael, Jennifer Brown, and David Canter, Eds. The Research Interview: Uses and Approaches. London: Academic P. 1985.
interviewing is valuable because of its "willingness to treat individuals as the heros of their own drama, as valuable sources of particular information" (3); "the interviewer should follow rules in his/her relationship with the informant....his/her questioning must always be nondirective; that is, must never suggest a 'right' answer or direction of answering; he/she must take care that the accounts obtained are adequate (as complete as possible, linguistically comprehensible, free of internal inconsistencies, for example); he/she must enact a facilitator role by being nonjudgmental and supportive" (159).
farraday and plummer: "sociologists using life history methods become more like a journalist, a novelist or a biographer" (p. 774). bertaux (1981) argues that the latter three roles are more effective agents for change than sociologists have ever been! (Benner et al 167)
& 169 a little digging into who's in control when in the research interview; technically the interviewer, by design, but the whole point of the open-ended form is that interviewees can take control & lead conversations in ways that account for their concerns, interests, anxieties relative to the topic.
tangential approaches: "asking a mother 'when did your child have flu?' is liable to produce error; some of this may be overcome if...other neutral marker events, such as birthdays and holidays, are used to build up a more accurate picture" (175).
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Spradley, James P. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, 1979.
characteristics of the good informant: he/she is
thoroughly enculturated, currently involved in the place/time being studied, a member of a cultural scene not already too familiar to the beginning researcher, able to make enough time available to be worked with, & nonanalytic: i.e. won't try to overexplain & do the researcher's job for him/her (46).
seemingly innocent questions like "what do you mean" or "why did you do that" can threaten responders b/c they "contain a hidden judgmental component. louder than words, they seem to shout, 'you haven't been clear; you haven't explained adequately; you are hiding the true reasons for what you told me'"--so ethnographic interviewing tries to avoid these questions, going instead for versions of "can you describe a situation wherein you might do x" as a way of finding out more indirectly & as less of a challenge what x means to the responder (82).
you don't always know what's relevant contextual information or whether your questions will be meaningful to your "informants" (ugh) unless/until you test them on representatives of your population (116-117).
Posted by ttobryan at August 30, 2006 02:32 PM