The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research

The Complexity of the Craft

Jaber F. Gubrium, James A. Holstein, Amir Marvasti, Karyn D. McKinney

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781483305691
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Recherche scientifique et méthodologie

The new edition of this landmark volume emphasizes the dynamic, interactional, and reflexive dimensions of the research interview. Contributors highlight the myriad dimensions of complexity that are emerging as researchers increasingly frame the interview as a communicative opportunity as much as a data-gathering format. The book begins with the history and conceptual transformations of the interview, which is followed by chapters that discuss the main components of interview practice. Taken together, the contributions to The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft encourage readers simultaneously to learn the frameworks and technologies of interviewing and to reflect on the epistemological foundations of the interview craft.

Part I

INTERVIEWING IN CONTEXT

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1

THE HISTORY OF THE INTERVIEW

Jennifer Platt

The “interview” has existed, and changed over time, both as a practice and as a methodological term in current use. However, the practice has not always been theorized or distinguished from other modes of acquiring information. Interviewing has sometimes been treated as a distinct method, but more often it has been located within some broader methodological category, such as “survey,” “case study,” or “life story.” It is not always easy to decide what should be treated as a part of interviewing as such; for instance, some discussion of interview questions is about the construction of schedules, without reference to how the questions are presented to the respondent. Here, the focus is on what happens while the interviewer is interacting with the respondent.

At each stage, the more fully institutionalized practices have been less likely to be written about in detail, except for the purpose of guiding trainees; therefore caution needs to be exercised in generalizing from the prescriptive literature to current practice. In principle, we aim here to look at both the theorization and the practice of the interview, without assuming that there has always been a close correspondence between the two. But interview practice has been very unevenly described. Descriptions of it are more common when some aspect becomes salient because it is seen as novel, unconventional, or problematic. Even then, what is described is commonly a policy or strategy rather than the actual practice, which may not always conform to the policy. Thus, for our historical account, we have to draw largely on prescriptions for practice as it should be.

We concentrate on the book literature; the main points in the journals will have been taken up in books if they were practically influential, so this is adequate for a broad overview. It is with regret that the decision had also to be made, given the limitations of space, to focus almost entirely on the U.S. experience. For the prewar period, especially its earlier part, this can be quite misleading, as other national disciplines had some of their own distinct traditions and discussion. From about 1945 to 1960, U.S. social science and the survey became so hegemonic elsewhere that they can perhaps be treated as representing the whole; after the high period of U.S. hegemony, however, this approach becomes less reasonable. This chapter is written from a sociologist’s perspective; the most likely bias is one toward work that sociologists have used and treated as important, whether or not the authors were sociologists. Those from other backgrounds are urged to supplement my examples with their own.

The U.S. book literature on interviewing falls into a number of categories, of which some illustrative examples are listed in Table 1.1. (Where possible these are chosen from works not extensively discussed below, to indicate more of the range of material.) There are relatively distinct intellectual and practical traditions here, despite overlaps and some strong influences across traditions, and this needs to be taken into account in placing the stances and concerns of single texts.

We concentrate on social-scientific interviewing, but that has not always been distinguished from the interviewing techniques of psychiatrists, social caseworkers, or personnel managers. When it has been so distinguished, work in such fields has still often been drawn on by social scientists. But the character of the literature has changed historically. The earliest relevant work was not specifically social scientific. As new practices such as polling and bodies such as survey organizations emerged, they generated writing that expressed their concerns and led to methodological research on issues they were interested in. Once an orthodoxy was established, there was room for critiques of it and declarations of independence from it. Those working on special groups developed special ways of dealing with them; then, with an understandable lag, theorists began to take an interest in the more philosophical aspects. Textbooks regularly strove to keep up with the main developments, while authors of empirical studies wrote about the experiences and needs specific to their particular topics. In later times, as the quantitative and qualitative worlds became increasingly separate, their discussions of interviewing diverged correspondingly. The quantitativists carried forward an established tradition with increasing sophistication, from time to time taking on technical innovations such as telephone interviewing, while qualitative workers blossomed out into focus groups, life histories, and own-brand novelties. However, an interesting link has recently been established in the use by surveyors of conversation-analytic techniques to analyze what is happening in their questions and answers.

Below, a broad outline of the trajectory of the field is sketched in via selected examples of such writings, starting with the prescriptive methodological literature and going on to empirical work that has been treated as methodologically important. We then review some key analytical themes. The literature of research on interviewing is looked at as much for what the concerns reflected there show us about the researchers’ focuses of interest as for what the findings have been, though research has surely influenced practice. The interlinked issues of changing interest in and thought about validity, conceptions of the appropriate social relations between interviewer and respondent, and the types of data sought by those working in different styles are briefly explored; some effort is made to draw out points of potential interest to researchers, whose concern is less with the history as such than it is with informing their own practice. Finally, the strands are drawn together to present a synthetic account of the ways in which interviewing and thinking about it have changed over time.

Table 1.1 Genres of Books Related to Interviewing

Genre	Examples
Practitioner textbooks	Garrett, Interviewing: Its Principles and Methods, 1942
Polling practice	Gallup, A Guide to Public Opinion Polls, 1944
Social science methods textbooks	Goode and Hatt, Methods in Social Research, 1952
Instructions to survey interviewers	University of Michigan, Survey Research Center, Manual for Interviewers, 1954
Critiques of method, general or particular	Christie and Jahoda, Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” 1954; Cicourel, Method and Measurement in Sociology, 1964
Empirical work discussing its methods	Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 1948
Handbooks	Denzin and Lincoln, Handbook of Qualitative Research, 1994
Monographs on special groups, novel approaches	Dexter, Elite and Specialized Interviewing, 1970; Douglas, Creative Interviewing, 1985
Philosophical/theoretical discussion	Sjoberg and Nett, A Methodology for Social Research, 1968
Reports of methodological research	Hyman, Interviewing in Social Research, 1954

The Trajectory of Change in Methodological Writing

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To give a sense of the broad trajectory of change, a sequence of arguably representative accounts of interviewing, in particular its forms and purposes, is presented below in order of historical appearance. Key points of content and assumptions are outlined, and each is briefly placed in its context.

HOWARD W. ODUM AND KATHARINE JOCHER, AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL RESEARCH, 1929

This was one of the first general social science methods textbooks. In it, in addition to “interview,” “schedule” (to be used by an enumerator) and “questionnaire” (to be answered unaided) are mentioned; for these, there is a discussion of questions and presentation but nothing on interviewing as such. (At this time, the conduct of structured interviews was not treated as being at all problematic and so was hardly discussed.) It is stated that

an interview is made for the purpose of securing information… about the informant himself, or about other persons or undertakings that he knows or is interested in. The purpose may be to secure a life history, to corroborate evidence got from other sources, to secure… data which the informant possesses. [It]… may also be the means of enlisting the informant’s cooperation… in the investigation…. If the student is not acquainted with the informant, some method of introduction through a mutual acquaintance should be secured. (pp. 366–367)

Permission to take notes should be requested.

As here, in the 1920s and 1930s, an “interview” was often assumed to be of a key informant or gatekeeper rather than a respondent who is merely one member of a sample (cf. Bingham & Moore, 1931; Fry, 1934). The implicit model of the old, fact-finding survey in the Booth tradition is still in the background; Booth’s data on the working-class family were provided by middle-class visitors (Bales, 1991). The interviewee may thus be an informant about the situation studied, as much as or more than being a part of it, and potentially of a status superior to the interviewer, another reason for allowing the respondent to structure the interaction. This does not mean that no questionnaires to mass samples were being used, though they were not common yet in academic social science, but that this was seen as a distinct method. It was often recommended that notes should not be taken during the interview, or only to a minimal extent, but that recording should be done as soon as possible afterward; questions might not be revealed or might be written on the back of an envelope to appear informal and spontaneous (see, e.g., Converse, 1987, p. 51). Clearly the role of respondent was not yet so institutionalized that no need to conceal the mechanics was felt.

PAULINE V. YOUNG, SCIENTIFIC SOCIAL SURVEYS AND RESEARCH, 1939

This was a very successful general methods textbook. “Interview” is again distinguished from “schedule” and “questionnaire,” which are dealt with separately. Young distinguishes respondents who are adequate sources on factual matters from those who are of interest as subjects, individually or in relation to the larger situation. A personal introduction to the respondent is still seen as desirable. “The interview proper does not begin until a considerable degree of rapport has been established…. The most important touchstone is probably the mutual discovery of common experiences” (p. 189). What does she see as the value of the interview?

The personal interview is penetrating; it goes to the “living source.” Through it the student… is able to go behind mere outward behavior and phenomena. He can secure accounts of events and processes as they are reflected in personal experiences, in social attitudes. He can check inferences and external observations by a vital account of the persons who are being observed…. [T]he field worker… needs to know in a general way why he is interviewing this particular person or group and what he intends asking… [but] needs to be open to unforeseen developments. (pp. 175, 179)

As few questions as possible should be asked:

When people are least interrupted, when they can tell their stories in their own way,… they can react naturally and freely and express themselves fully…. [Interruptions and leading questions are likely to have the effect that]… the adventure into the unknown, into uncharted and hitherto undisclosed spheres, has been destroyed. (p. 190)

It is rarely advisable to complete an interview at one sitting (p. 195). It is better not to take notes, except maybe a few key words, and it is seen as controversial whether to record the interview in the first or the third person and whether a verbatim account is to be preferred to a summary by the interviewer (pp. 196, 200).

Young’s department at the University of Southern California was oriented toward the training of practitioners; her Interviewing in Social Work (1935) was widely cited in sociology when there were few other such sources to draw on. Its perceived relevance owed something to the widespread use by sociologists, especially at the University of Chicago where she was trained, of case histories collected by social workers; this connects with the idea of the case study and of the significance of life history data, which are clearly the contexts she has in mind in the passages quoted above (Platt, 1996, p. 46). One may also perhaps detect formative traces of the participant observation she used in her doctoral work. George A. Lundberg’s (1942) important—and intellectually far superior—textbook takes a similar approach, despite his strongly scientistic tastes, though with a slight twist in the direction of the more modern concern with personality and psychoanalytical interests.

By the 1949 edition of her text, Young had mentioned the modern survey, though she was far from treating it as the paradigm:

A specialized form of the interview is useful in the collection of personal data for quantitative purposes. This type of interview aims to accumulate a variety of uniform responses to a wide scope of predetermined specific questions. (Generally these questions appear on a printed form.) (p. 244)

This distanced account was in effect one of the last traces of an older conception.

CHARLES F. CANNELL AND ROBERT L. KAHN, “THE COLLECTION OF DATA BY INTERVIEWING,” 1953

This is a chapter in what became a standard general methods text, written by a group from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR). Cannell and Kahn, the former a clinical and the latter a social psychologist, were members of the team that became the wartime Division of Program Surveys (DPS) and after the war transformed itself into the Institute for Social Research. In this chapter they attempt to go beyond current rules of thumb and to draw on work in counseling and communication theory to understand the psychology of the interview. (Their later book, The Dynamics of Interviewing, Kahn & Cannell, 1957, carries this forward, coming to the formulation of objectives and questions only after three chapters on the interviewing relationship.)

The following extract shows their relatively qualitative orientation, which nonetheless goes with a strong commitment to scientific procedure; one may detect some tensions between the two:

Even when the research objectives call for information which is beyond the individual’s power to provide directly, the interview is often an effective means of obtaining the desired data…. Bias and lack of training make it impossible for an individual to provide such intimate information about himself, even if he is motivated to the utmost frankness. But only he can provide the...