This chapter introduces this collection by reviewing work that uses ethnomethodologically inspired approaches to analyze research interviews. These analyses supplement data representations that focus on “what” topics are talked about with information concerning “how” topics are elicited in specific interactional contexts. Informed by critiques that much interview research fails to account for interactional contexts in which descriptions were generated, this work uses tools drawn from ethnomethodology (EM), membership categorization analysis (MCA) and conversation analysis (CA) to explore features of interview interaction, construction of speakers’ accounts, interviewers’ roles in the generation of data, and what this means for social research. This work informs (1) the design and conduct of research studies, specifically the formulation of interview questions to elicit interviewees’ accounts, and the conduct of interviews with special populations, (2) the analysis and representation of interview data, and (3) the teaching of interview practice. The chapter concludes by introducing readers to the organization of the book and forthcoming chapters.
This chapter is about research in Disability Studies, where co-production, inclusivity and peer research are central ( Barton 2005; Walmsley and Johnson 2003; Williams 1999, 2011, 2016). For instance, Williams (1999), which I will refer to as Project 1 involves disabled people and their organisations, both as researchers and researched. In emancipatory models (Oliver 1992; Zarb 1992; Barnes 2003), the notion is that disabled people are in control of the research agenda, not necessarily carrying out the research. Nevertheless, one of the arguments for the value of peer research is that a disabled researcher will be able to identify with disabled participants, and thereby produce richer data (Nind and Vinha 2014). However, as illustrated by Roulston (this volume), when interviewer and interviewee share a knowledge domain, the production of data in the interview can be problematic. This chapter adds to the notions of relative epistemic domains, by exploring the ways in which interviewer and interviewee not only attend to epistemics, but also to each other’s wider identities.
The qualitative research interview is ubiquitously framed as producing information about research participants’ beliefs, perspectives, opinions and experiences. These beliefs, perspectives, opinions and experiences are derived from people who are experts on their selves – that is, they have first-person knowledge of the “territories of the self” ( Goffman 1971 ). In concert with Goffman’s work on territories of the self, in this chapter I use work on epistemics in conversation as a tool to explore how interviewers elicit knowledge claims from research participants during interviews. Scholarship on interviewing describes the dilemma faced by research interviewers who must navigate the spectrum of potential relationships with interviewees: on the one hand, as an “insider” to a culture, “everything goes without saying”; at the other extreme, “total divergence” in which interviewer and interviewee have no shared language with which to speak about topics ( Bourdieu et al. 1999 ). Yet, between these two poles lie any number of potential stances from which more or less knowledgeable (K+/K−) interviewers ask questions seeking information from more or less knowledgeable (K+/K−) (Heritage 2013) research participants. This chapter examines excerpts from interview data to explore key ideas drawn from literature on epistemics in conversation analysis to consider the researcher’s work of asking questions in research interviews for the purpose of knowledge production.
Novice interviewers can face many problems related to interviewing technique, theoretical and ethical tensions, developing rapport, and the production of knowledge and identities with strangers and in cross-cultural contexts. Reanalyzing problematic or failed interviews using ethnomethodological (EM) approaches and the tools of membership categorization analysis (MCA) is one way of exploring minute details of interview talk to improve interview conduct. Using an EM approach and the tools of MCA, this chapter re-examines previously abandoned interview data to demonstrate how conversational resources used by a novice interviewer and interviewee led to the production of shared understandings and the production of various identities in cross-cultural contexts. This chapter concludes with recommendations for using this kind of analysis when training novice interviewers. This work recommends an intentional approach to thinking through researcher ethics before interviews are conducted to promote interview practices where data are generated, analyzed, and represented in more ethical ways.
Social, cultural, and institutional norms invoked by adults in school settings often limit children’s voices in educational research. This chapter re-examines interview data, focusing on methodologies used to address the challenges associated with interviewing children. For this analysis, three challenges have been identified from transcripts: limiting the child/adult binary, analyzing children’s language, and overcoming children’s inexperience with interviewing. To address these challenges, this chapter focuses on methodological strategies used in an ethnographically inspired research study. These strategies included framing children’s positions through the reconceptualized model of childhood, using open or emergent listening (Davies 2011, 2014) during interviews, and reactive entry methods (Corsaro 1985, 2003). The analysis of the children’s language is expanded to include the bodily ways or multimodal forms of communication and the closer examination of the children’s abilities to participate in multiple conversations during interviews. Excerpts from interviews initially perceived to have “failed” are examined to understand how children’s inexperience with interviewing can be misinterpreted as unpredictable. Finally, interviews are interpreted as pedagogical encounters in which children are taught cultural and social norms.
This chapter examines epistemic shifts over the course of one year of interviews with “Bailey,” specifically in relation to the interviewer’s tendency to praise Bailey. Initially, Bailey sought the researcher and interviewer’s advice, establishing herself as having a knowledge deficit (K-) and the interviewer as an expert (K+). In this analysis, the researcher examines the epistemic shifts partially demonstrated through Bailey’s self-praise, which established Bailey as knowledgeable and an advisor to others (K+). In this chapter, the author shows how Bailey’s K+ self-descriptors contradict conversation norms, in that individuals typically downgrade their accomplishments and abilities in talk with others. In reexamining the data, the author finds that Bailey’s self-praise was in response to the interviewer’s talk, as she actively praised Bailey and Bailey’s teaching practice throughout the data. This discussion is valuable to interview-based research both because it explores the ways that an interviewer’s interactions shape a participant’s responses and the ways that, over multiple interviews, those interactions might influence epistemic shifts in interviewer/interviewee exchanges.
This study of a bilingual (Japanese-English) research interview, taken from a project investigating language practices in intermarried (Japanese/non-Japanese) families, examines the impact of interviewer and interviewee’s differing, and sometimes competing, perspectives and agendas. Drawing on conversation analysis and informed by work on stance, it examines how the interviewer’s presumptions, based in part on interviews with other family members, shaped the interview and challenged the Japanese interviewee’s identity as a good parent, and even, potentially, his linguistic identity as an English speaker. Following the interviewer’s code-switches from English to Japanese as part of repair, the interviewee uses standard Japanese and a regional variety that breaks out of the ‘information gathering/confirming’ frame and expresses an extended, more direct, and oppositional stance toward the research topic. By closely examining the unfolding interaction between interviewer and interviewee, this chapter offers a reflective perspective on research interviewing practices and how language ideology and language choice impact the generation of data and the management of conflicting perspectives between interviewer and interviewee.
By adopting a “social practice” perspective of qualitative interviews, and thereby considering such tool of data collection as a joint accomplishment of both interviewee and interviewer, in this chapter the author examines language biography interviews as they are co-constructed by conversational partners. Using conversation analysis (CA), the chapter looks at how participants locally negotiate the interactional frame of their encounter as institutional talk leading to the generation of research data. How interviewees display their “for the record” orientation by assessing their own talk, as well by drawing upon the encounter as a resource to let their voice be heard is then discussed.
The focus group is typically defined as a form of research interview involving a group of people, facilitated by a moderator with prepared questions (Puchta and Potter 2004). The purpose of focus groups is to elicit participants’ descriptions of feelings, opinions, perceptions, and attitudes concerning the topic. As in other interviews, focus groups lend findings that rely largely on the interactional contingencies and dynamics that occur within, and yet less work has focused on their interactional features. Using conversation analysis (CA), this chapter aims to respecify focus group interaction as a locus for participants’ locally, collaboratively and sometimes incongruently accomplished actions, specifically focusing on the contingency of participants’ discussion sequences. With data examples from focus groups that were conducted with Korean teachers of English (EFL) within a teacher development program evaluation context, this chapter outlines how participants make use of diverse interactional resources in collaboratively constructing responses. This analysis helps to illuminate the major findings of the focus groups.
Richards (2011) discussed the importance of understanding the role that continuers (Schegloff 1982) play in research interviews, proposing that understanding how talk is organized has been overlooked in researcher training. This paper draws from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to explore the researcher’s use of “mm hm” as a response token in a set of three interviews conducted with one participant during a qualitative case study. Specifically, it focuses on how the use of “mm hm” as a continuer, an acknowledgement token used as a way to give attention to participant accounting, and the use of silence might contribute to the interactional accomplishment of establishing rapport. Finally, the researcher reflects on the usefulness of examining response tokens in research interviews ethnomethodologically, the implications for developing interviewing expertise, and offers suggestions for future research.
Taking as reference an oral corpus in European Portuguese constituted by twenty-three narratives of life experience gathered under the frame of a sociological research project developed in the North of Portugal, this chapter analyses the strategic use of linguistic mitigation devices in the interviewer’s actions and in the interviewees’ answers followed by justifications. Narratives occurring in research interviews are part of a testimonial discourse. In the development of the topics that concern interviewees’ lifestyles and housing conditions, we can identify the occurrence of sequences of justification with the use of a “membership categorization device” that speakers use to construct identities in talk and to invoke common places to deal with dilemmas brought by the questions that occur during the interview.
This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the narratives of life experiences are the result of collaborative work in jointly constructing the sense given by the interviewer and the interviewee. As such, the analysis of discourse segments that show the “conversational involvement” (Goffman 1981; Gumperz 1982) of participants in the research interviews has contributed to the debate on the specific discourse practices taking place within these interactional research contexts in the Social Sciences.
In this closing chapter, I will offer some thoughts about how this volume extends existing methodological literature on qualitative interviewing, as well as further ideas for exploration. I will show how this volume offers a future direction for a range of work, including a focus on different modes or forms of interviews, identities and epistemics, as well as the role of the interview schedule. Finally, I show that despite this volume’s focus on the interactional work within interview interactions, it also suggests a trajectory of work that looks both across and beyond the spaces of the interview interactions.
This chapter introduces this collection by reviewing work that uses ethnomethodologically inspired approaches to analyze research interviews. These analyses supplement data representations that focus on “what” topics are talked about with information concerning “how” topics are elicited in specific interactional contexts. Informed by critiques that much interview research fails to account for interactional contexts in which descriptions were generated, this work uses tools drawn from ethnomethodology (EM), membership categorization analysis (MCA) and conversation analysis (CA) to explore features of interview interaction, construction of speakers’ accounts, interviewers’ roles in the generation of data, and what this means for social research. This work informs (1) the design and conduct of research studies, specifically the formulation of interview questions to elicit interviewees’ accounts, and the conduct of interviews with special populations, (2) the analysis and representation of interview data, and (3) the teaching of interview practice. The chapter concludes by introducing readers to the organization of the book and forthcoming chapters.
This chapter is about research in Disability Studies, where co-production, inclusivity and peer research are central ( Barton 2005; Walmsley and Johnson 2003; Williams 1999, 2011, 2016). For instance, Williams (1999), which I will refer to as Project 1 involves disabled people and their organisations, both as researchers and researched. In emancipatory models (Oliver 1992; Zarb 1992; Barnes 2003), the notion is that disabled people are in control of the research agenda, not necessarily carrying out the research. Nevertheless, one of the arguments for the value of peer research is that a disabled researcher will be able to identify with disabled participants, and thereby produce richer data (Nind and Vinha 2014). However, as illustrated by Roulston (this volume), when interviewer and interviewee share a knowledge domain, the production of data in the interview can be problematic. This chapter adds to the notions of relative epistemic domains, by exploring the ways in which interviewer and interviewee not only attend to epistemics, but also to each other’s wider identities.
The qualitative research interview is ubiquitously framed as producing information about research participants’ beliefs, perspectives, opinions and experiences. These beliefs, perspectives, opinions and experiences are derived from people who are experts on their selves – that is, they have first-person knowledge of the “territories of the self” ( Goffman 1971 ). In concert with Goffman’s work on territories of the self, in this chapter I use work on epistemics in conversation as a tool to explore how interviewers elicit knowledge claims from research participants during interviews. Scholarship on interviewing describes the dilemma faced by research interviewers who must navigate the spectrum of potential relationships with interviewees: on the one hand, as an “insider” to a culture, “everything goes without saying”; at the other extreme, “total divergence” in which interviewer and interviewee have no shared language with which to speak about topics ( Bourdieu et al. 1999 ). Yet, between these two poles lie any number of potential stances from which more or less knowledgeable (K+/K−) interviewers ask questions seeking information from more or less knowledgeable (K+/K−) (Heritage 2013) research participants. This chapter examines excerpts from interview data to explore key ideas drawn from literature on epistemics in conversation analysis to consider the researcher’s work of asking questions in research interviews for the purpose of knowledge production.
Novice interviewers can face many problems related to interviewing technique, theoretical and ethical tensions, developing rapport, and the production of knowledge and identities with strangers and in cross-cultural contexts. Reanalyzing problematic or failed interviews using ethnomethodological (EM) approaches and the tools of membership categorization analysis (MCA) is one way of exploring minute details of interview talk to improve interview conduct. Using an EM approach and the tools of MCA, this chapter re-examines previously abandoned interview data to demonstrate how conversational resources used by a novice interviewer and interviewee led to the production of shared understandings and the production of various identities in cross-cultural contexts. This chapter concludes with recommendations for using this kind of analysis when training novice interviewers. This work recommends an intentional approach to thinking through researcher ethics before interviews are conducted to promote interview practices where data are generated, analyzed, and represented in more ethical ways.
Social, cultural, and institutional norms invoked by adults in school settings often limit children’s voices in educational research. This chapter re-examines interview data, focusing on methodologies used to address the challenges associated with interviewing children. For this analysis, three challenges have been identified from transcripts: limiting the child/adult binary, analyzing children’s language, and overcoming children’s inexperience with interviewing. To address these challenges, this chapter focuses on methodological strategies used in an ethnographically inspired research study. These strategies included framing children’s positions through the reconceptualized model of childhood, using open or emergent listening (Davies 2011, 2014) during interviews, and reactive entry methods (Corsaro 1985, 2003). The analysis of the children’s language is expanded to include the bodily ways or multimodal forms of communication and the closer examination of the children’s abilities to participate in multiple conversations during interviews. Excerpts from interviews initially perceived to have “failed” are examined to understand how children’s inexperience with interviewing can be misinterpreted as unpredictable. Finally, interviews are interpreted as pedagogical encounters in which children are taught cultural and social norms.
This chapter examines epistemic shifts over the course of one year of interviews with “Bailey,” specifically in relation to the interviewer’s tendency to praise Bailey. Initially, Bailey sought the researcher and interviewer’s advice, establishing herself as having a knowledge deficit (K-) and the interviewer as an expert (K+). In this analysis, the researcher examines the epistemic shifts partially demonstrated through Bailey’s self-praise, which established Bailey as knowledgeable and an advisor to others (K+). In this chapter, the author shows how Bailey’s K+ self-descriptors contradict conversation norms, in that individuals typically downgrade their accomplishments and abilities in talk with others. In reexamining the data, the author finds that Bailey’s self-praise was in response to the interviewer’s talk, as she actively praised Bailey and Bailey’s teaching practice throughout the data. This discussion is valuable to interview-based research both because it explores the ways that an interviewer’s interactions shape a participant’s responses and the ways that, over multiple interviews, those interactions might influence epistemic shifts in interviewer/interviewee exchanges.
This study of a bilingual (Japanese-English) research interview, taken from a project investigating language practices in intermarried (Japanese/non-Japanese) families, examines the impact of interviewer and interviewee’s differing, and sometimes competing, perspectives and agendas. Drawing on conversation analysis and informed by work on stance, it examines how the interviewer’s presumptions, based in part on interviews with other family members, shaped the interview and challenged the Japanese interviewee’s identity as a good parent, and even, potentially, his linguistic identity as an English speaker. Following the interviewer’s code-switches from English to Japanese as part of repair, the interviewee uses standard Japanese and a regional variety that breaks out of the ‘information gathering/confirming’ frame and expresses an extended, more direct, and oppositional stance toward the research topic. By closely examining the unfolding interaction between interviewer and interviewee, this chapter offers a reflective perspective on research interviewing practices and how language ideology and language choice impact the generation of data and the management of conflicting perspectives between interviewer and interviewee.
By adopting a “social practice” perspective of qualitative interviews, and thereby considering such tool of data collection as a joint accomplishment of both interviewee and interviewer, in this chapter the author examines language biography interviews as they are co-constructed by conversational partners. Using conversation analysis (CA), the chapter looks at how participants locally negotiate the interactional frame of their encounter as institutional talk leading to the generation of research data. How interviewees display their “for the record” orientation by assessing their own talk, as well by drawing upon the encounter as a resource to let their voice be heard is then discussed.
The focus group is typically defined as a form of research interview involving a group of people, facilitated by a moderator with prepared questions (Puchta and Potter 2004). The purpose of focus groups is to elicit participants’ descriptions of feelings, opinions, perceptions, and attitudes concerning the topic. As in other interviews, focus groups lend findings that rely largely on the interactional contingencies and dynamics that occur within, and yet less work has focused on their interactional features. Using conversation analysis (CA), this chapter aims to respecify focus group interaction as a locus for participants’ locally, collaboratively and sometimes incongruently accomplished actions, specifically focusing on the contingency of participants’ discussion sequences. With data examples from focus groups that were conducted with Korean teachers of English (EFL) within a teacher development program evaluation context, this chapter outlines how participants make use of diverse interactional resources in collaboratively constructing responses. This analysis helps to illuminate the major findings of the focus groups.
Richards (2011) discussed the importance of understanding the role that continuers (Schegloff 1982) play in research interviews, proposing that understanding how talk is organized has been overlooked in researcher training. This paper draws from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to explore the researcher’s use of “mm hm” as a response token in a set of three interviews conducted with one participant during a qualitative case study. Specifically, it focuses on how the use of “mm hm” as a continuer, an acknowledgement token used as a way to give attention to participant accounting, and the use of silence might contribute to the interactional accomplishment of establishing rapport. Finally, the researcher reflects on the usefulness of examining response tokens in research interviews ethnomethodologically, the implications for developing interviewing expertise, and offers suggestions for future research.
Taking as reference an oral corpus in European Portuguese constituted by twenty-three narratives of life experience gathered under the frame of a sociological research project developed in the North of Portugal, this chapter analyses the strategic use of linguistic mitigation devices in the interviewer’s actions and in the interviewees’ answers followed by justifications. Narratives occurring in research interviews are part of a testimonial discourse. In the development of the topics that concern interviewees’ lifestyles and housing conditions, we can identify the occurrence of sequences of justification with the use of a “membership categorization device” that speakers use to construct identities in talk and to invoke common places to deal with dilemmas brought by the questions that occur during the interview.
This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the narratives of life experiences are the result of collaborative work in jointly constructing the sense given by the interviewer and the interviewee. As such, the analysis of discourse segments that show the “conversational involvement” (Goffman 1981; Gumperz 1982) of participants in the research interviews has contributed to the debate on the specific discourse practices taking place within these interactional research contexts in the Social Sciences.
In this closing chapter, I will offer some thoughts about how this volume extends existing methodological literature on qualitative interviewing, as well as further ideas for exploration. I will show how this volume offers a future direction for a range of work, including a focus on different modes or forms of interviews, identities and epistemics, as well as the role of the interview schedule. Finally, I show that despite this volume’s focus on the interactional work within interview interactions, it also suggests a trajectory of work that looks both across and beyond the spaces of the interview interactions.