Cinnabar and Alabaster

basic definition (from preface): "interviews are conversations where the outcome is a coproduction of the interviewer and the subject" (xvii)

traveler metaphor: in addition to wandering around talking to whomever he/she encounters, "the traveler may also deliberately seek specific sites or topics by following a method, with the original Greek meaning of 'a route that leads to the goal.' the interviewer wanders along with the local inhabitants, asks questions that lead the subjects to tell their own stories of their lived world, and converses with them in the original Latin meaning of conversation as 'wandering together with'" + "the journey may not only lead to new knowledge; the traveler might change as well" (4).

the book's particular domain: the "semistructured life world interview" defined as "an interview whose purpose is to obtain descriptions of the life world of the interviewee with respect to interpreting the meaning of the described phenomena"--& i want my interviewees to do as much of the interpreting as they can so that i'm not imposing upon them any more than is absolutely necessary.

Conversation is an ancient form of obtaining knowledge. Thucydides interviewed participants from the Peloponnesian Wars to write the history of the wars, and Socrates used dialogue to obtain philosophical knowledge.

necessary disclaimer: "the interview...is neither a progressive nor an oppressive method....the knowledge produced can be used either to enhance the inbestigated subjects' condition or to manipulate their behavior more efficiently" (11)

more definitions: "technically, the qualitative research interview is semistructured: it is neither an open conversation nor a highly structured questionnaire. it is conducted according to an interview guide that focuses on certain themes and that may include suggested questions. the interview is usually transcribed, and the written text together with the tape recording are the material for the subsequent interpretation of meaning" (27); in the model provided "the interviewer's questions aimed at a cognitive clarification of the subject's story....the mode of interviewing was inspired by a phenomenological philosophy, which is based on a descriptive study of consciousness" (29)

where it gets tricksy: "the interviewer registers and interprets what is said as well as how it is said; he or she must be observant of--and able to interpret--vocalization, facial expressions, and other bodily gestures. an everyday conversation often takes place on a factual level. a pupil may state: 'i am not as stupid as my grades at the examinations showed, but i have bad study habits.' common reactions could then be on a factual level: 'what grades did you get?' or 'what are your study habits?'--questions that also may yield important information. a meaning-oriented reply would, in contrast, be something like, 'you feel that the grades are not an adqueate measure of your competence?'....it is necessary to listen to the explicit descriptions and meanings as well as to what is 'said between the lines.' the interviewer may seek to formulate the 'implicit message,' 'send it back' to the subject, and obtain an immediate confirmation or disconfirmation of the interviewer's interpretation of what the interviewee is saying" (32) <--& if you're doing that, then interpretation--b/c it's collaborative--seems less iffy, although i still imagine ugrads, anyway, saying yes to restatements they don't really follow. but this makes me twitchy: "the question of why the subjects experience and act as they do is primarily a task for the researcher to evaluate. an analogy to a doctor's diagnosis may be clarifying" (32)... or thoroughly obfuscating, since doctors mostly diagnose based on lists of symptoms observed in past patients, not on interpretive guesses about causality...

done properly, the qual. reserch interview "is focused on certain themes in the interviewee's life world. it is neither strictly structured with standardized questions, nor entirely 'nondirective,' but....the interviewer leads the subject toward certain themes, but not to certain opinions about these themes" (34).

rorty ("a neopragmatist philosopher") on knowledge: "the notion of mind as re-presenting an objective world can be discarded, 'if we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature' (rorty, 1979, p. 171). the certainty of our knowledge is a matter of conversation between persons, rather than as a matter of interaction with a nonhuman reality. if we regard knowing not as having an essence but as a right to believe, we may see 'conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is understood' (p. 389)" (37).

gadamer & shotter: conversation is how human creatures construct reality: conversation in interviewing "is not only a specific empirical method: it also involves a basic mode of constituting knowledge; and the human world is a conversational reality" (37).

gooey border-drawing interviewing (like this) has theoretical bases in: postmodern thought, hermeneutics, phenomenology, & dialectics; "a phenomenological perspective includes a focus on the life world, an openness to the experiences of the subjects, a primacy of precise descriptions, attempts to bracket foreknowledge, and a search for invariant essential meanings in the descriptions" (38-9). [begin creep factor here: "invariant essential meanings"? on this planet?]

from PoMo we get "Knowedge as Conversation" (rorty, gadamer, shotter), "Knowledge as Narrative" (lyotard), "Knowledge as Language" (presumably derrida et. al.--he doesn't specify), "Knowledge as Context" (again) & "Knowledge as Interrelational" (more lyotard + merleau-ponty, both of whose work he calls phenomenological) (40-4)

[what separates the "hermeneutic meaning interpretation" (which is so interpretation-oriented & determinedly textual that i'm shoving it aside) from seeking (& creating by interpretive moves) "invariant essential meaning"?]

phenomenological description: "is based on phenomenology in the sense of understanding social phenomena from the actors' own perspectives, describing the world as experienced by the subjects, and with the assumption that the important reality is what people perceive it to be" (52) [which to me flies like a red flag of contrast against that invariant-essential business...] "[it] is interested in elucidating both that which appears and the manner in which it appears. it studies the subjects' perspectives on their world; attempts to describe in detail the content and structure of the subjects' consciousness, to grasp the qualitative diversity of their experiences" [good so far, BUT-->] "and to explicate their essential meanings." [doesn't essentializing meaning drown complexity/reality in really ungood ways? danger danger-->] "phenomenology attempts to get beyond immediately experienced meanings in order to articulate the prereflective level of lived meanings, to make the invisible visible" (53)(by inventive interpretation? this sounds like exactly what i don't want to be doing--yet isn't it also an accurate presentation of what i propose? i want to know what writers' (invisible) reasons are for their (visible) actions... but i don't want to impose a reading on their experiences; i want to know what they think they're doing.)

description of open description: (spiegelberg) "'keeping the eyes open,' 'not think, but see.' according to merleau-ponty (1962), what matters is to describe the given as precisely and completely as possible; to describe rather than explain or analyze." [right! does this only seem to fold back on itself to me?] "phenomenology is the attempt at a direct description of experience, without any considerations about the origin or cause of an experience. in phenomenological philosophy, objectivity is reached through intentional acts of consciousness and is an expression of fidelity to the phenomena investigated" ...until "in the investigation of essences one shifts from describing separate phenomena to searching for their common essence....this means varying a given phenomenon freely in its possible forms, and that which remains constant through the different variations is the essence..." (53).

bracketing: "a phenomenological reduction calls for a suspension of judgment as to the existence or nonexistence of the content of an experience" & "can be pictured as a 'bracketing,' an attempt to place the common sense and scientific knowledge about the phenomena within parentheses in order to arrive at an unprejudiced description of the essence.... [it] does not involve an absolute absence of presuppositions, but rather a critical analysis of one's own presuppositions" (54).

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless, the whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experiences of the world of which science is the second order expression. (p.viii) --merleau-ponty (1962)

acknowledgement of contradictions: "both phenomenology and dialectics seek the essences beneath the manifest appearances, while in postmodern thought the appearance has become the essence" (58) <--but i don't think this either; writers cite poorly not b/c they don't know how (appearance) but because they don't know why (how-purpose vs. how-implementation)

objectivity: as freedom from bias (is untenable), as reliability (don't we already have a term for that?), & as "reflecting the nature of the object researched" (we have a term for that too: suitability) (65).

methods: 7 stages of an interview investigation
thematizing--hypotheses & general questions
designing--specific questions aimed at testing the hypothesis
interviewing
transcribing
analyzing
verifying
reporting (81)

in academic journals, the what-i-did component of the write-up has to always look like "a distorted technical picture of scientific research as a logical, linear process" that of course it isn't/never was (83).

thematizing: most studies have methodological problems b/c they try to assign "how"s to their plans before thoroughly developing their "what"s and "why"s. don't. (95).

designing: develop your overview before you start (carefully), remember how many factors are interdependent (most of them), "keep the endpoint in sight" ("stay on target"), don't procrastinate, & expect to learn/evolve work along the way (99-100).

ethics: have some.

proceedures: "the interview is a stage upon which knowledge is constructed through the interaction of interviewer and interviewee roles"; "the interviewees should be provided with context....the context is introduced with a briefing in which the interviewer defines the situation for the subject; briefly tells about the purpose of the interview, the use of a tape recorder, and so on; and asks if the subject has any questions before starting the interview....the first minutes of an interview are decisive. the subjects will want to have a grasp of the interviewer before they allow themselves to talk freely....a good contact is established by attentive listening, with the interviewer showing interest, understanding, and respect for what the subject says; at the same time, the interviewer is at ease and clear about what he or she wants to know. the initial briefing should be followed up by a debriefing after the interview....there may be some tension or anxiety, because the subject has been open about often personal and emotional experiences...the interaction can be rounded off by the interviewer mentioning some of the main points learned from the interview. the subject may then want to comment on this feedback. the interaction can thereafter be concluded by the interviewer saying, for example, 'i have no further questions. do you have anything more you want to bring up, or ask about, before we finish the interiew?'" (128).

types of interview question:
introducing questions: "can you tell me about...?"
follow-up questions
probing questions: "could you say something more about that?"
specifying questions
direct questions: "have you ever done x"
indirect questions "how do you believe most people feel about x"
structuring questions: "now i want to ask instead about"
silence (ah, wait time)
interpreting questions: "you then mean that...?" (133-5)

transcription is inherently interpretive (160). duh.

more don'ts: don't collect 1000 pages of shit what needs transcription (181)! (a) plan better, (b) focus your questioning/recording, & (c) "the interviewee's statements are not collected--they are coauthored by the interviewer" (183)

strategies: categorization, condensation, narrative structuring, & "ad hoc tactics"--do what makes sense in the scenario: from miles & huberman--> "noting patterns, themes (1), seeing plausibility (2), and clustering (3)....making metaphors (4)....counting (5).... making contrasts/comparisons (6).... partitioning variables (7) .... subsuming particulars under the general (8); factoring (9)....noting relations between variables (10); and finding intervening variables (11)...building a logical chain of evidence(12) and making conceptual/theoretical coherence (13)" (204).

beware the "pervasiveness of interpretation"; doesn't happen @ the analysis stage only but is always happening (205).

plurality of interpretation (210): me & the writers themselves? hope that's plural enough...