The Long Interview

Grant McCracken

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1988
• Print ISBN: 9780803933538
• eBook ISBN: 9781506349633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Long Interview provides a systematic guide to the theory and methods of the long qualitative interview or intensive interviewing. It gives a clear explanation of one of the most powerful tools of the qualitative researcher. The volume begins with a general overview of the character and purpose of qualitative inquiry and a review of key issues. The author outlines the four steps of the long qualitative interview and how to judge quality. He then offers practical advice for those who commission and administer this research, including sample questionnaires and budgets to help readers design their own. The author introduces key theoretical and methodological issues, various research strategies, and a simple four stage model of inquiry, from the design of an open-ended questionnaire to the write up of results.

THE LONG INTERVIEW

GRANT McCRACKEN
University of Guelph

1. INTRODUCTION

The long interview is one of the most powerful methods in the qualitative armory. For certain descriptive and analytic purposes, no instrument of inquiry is more revealing. The method can take us into the mental world of the individual, to glimpse the categories and logic by which he or she sees the world. It can also take us into the lifeworld of the individual, to see the content and pattern of daily experience. The long interview gives us the opportunity to step into the mind of another person, to see and experience the world as they do themselves.

The applications of such an instrument are, of course, endless. Every social scientific study is improved by a clearer understanding of the beliefs and experience of the actors in question. For instance, the quantitative study concerned with birth rates is improved by the knowledge of how social actors define and experience “family,” “parenthood,” “child rearing,” and so on. The study devoted to economic expenditure is improved by an understanding of the cultural matters that inform the acts of getting and spending. Without these understandings, our vision of social scientific data is monocular when it could be binocular. Without a qualitative understanding of how culture mediates human action, we can know only what the numbers tell us. The long qualitative interview is useful because it can help us to situate these numbers in their fuller social and cultural context.

In other cases, qualitative methods and the long interview are compelling, almost obligatory. It is difficult to imagine a study of “friendship,” for instance, that does not inquire into how people define a friend, how they experience a friendship, and the silent assumptions that operate in every social situation to dictate how friends and nonfriends act. The long interview lets us map out the organizing ideas of friendship and determine how these ideas enter into the individual’s view of the world. It also lets us see how friendship works as a constituent of the individual’s daily experience.

But there is a third class of research that invites qualitative research: the applied social sciences. As my colleagues demonstrate daily, social scientists now apply their skills to a wide range of urgent issues. They seek to determine the best relocation strategies for the elderly, how day care can be adapted to the needs of the single parent, how to establish new product development strategies, what the two-parent, single-child family wants in the design of a condominium, to give just a few local examples. These are issues that cry out for qualitative treatment. What does “home” mean to the elderly, how does a single mother organize her time, what is “innovation” for management, and what bundle of attitudes, interests, and activities is the urban nuclear family? The application of the social sciences to the study and improvement of contemporary life depends upon these intimate understandings of the respondent.

But if qualitative methods are important, their use in the study of modern societies is not by any means straightforward. The difficulty is that respondents lead hectic, deeply segmented, and privacy-centered lives. Even the most willing of them have only limited time and attention to give the investigator. Qualitative methods may have the power to take the investigator into the minds and lives of the respondents, to capture them warts and all. But few respondents are willing to sit for all the hours it takes to complete the portrait.

Some social scientists are unconcerned with this shortage of time. In the conventional field setting, the anthropologist can insinuate him- or herself into the life of the community gradually and by stages. He or she can take many months of inquiry and exposure to construct an understanding of the community’s world view and daily life. Plainly, however, the rigors and demands of this kind of qualitative inquiry are extremely high. Few social scientists have this much time at their disposal. Indeed, most are no richer in time than their respondents. Rarely can they suspend the demands of teaching, administration, other research projects, and their own private lives sufficiently to create the vast blocks of time that participant observation demands.

But it is also true that certain vital arenas of modern life are simply closed to social scientific scrutiny. For instance, no North American family is likely to suffer the presence of an observer for an extended period of time. Public and private corporations are equally unenthusiastic about an observer who has no stake in the proceedings. Political parties have similar scruples, as do a range of special interest groups. North Americans value, depend upon, and vigorously defend their privacy. They are loath to see it breached. As a result, social scientists are denied the opportunity of participating as observers in the lives of many of the people they wish to understand.

These two factors, time scarcity and concern for privacy, stand as important impediments to the qualitative study of modern life. It is precisely these impediments that make the long interview so valuable as a means of inquiry. For this research strategy gives us access to individuals without violating their privacy or testing their patience. It allows us to capture the data needed for penetrating qualitative analysis without participant observation, unobtrusive observation, or prolonged contact. It allows us, in other words, to achieve crucial qualitative objectives within a manageable methodological context.

2. NINE KEY ISSUES

There are several areas of controversy within qualitative research methodology. One of these concerns the way in which the qualitative research community has fashioned, or refused to fashion, a relationship to the several social sciences and alternative methods of social scientific study. As we shall see, this point has proven explosively controversial. Some qualitative researchers have chosen to look beyond their own borders to other methods and many disciplines. Others have insisted on the virtue of tending their own garden. The methodology presented here comes down very firmly on the side of the former.

The second compelling question concerns the relationship between the researcher and his or her own culture. This issue takes us to the very heart of the great potential and the great difficulty of qualitative methodology. It is precisely because the qualitative researchers are working in their own culture that they can make the long interview do such powerful work. It is by drawing on their understanding of how they themselves see and experience the world that they can supplement and interpret the data they generate in the long interview. Just as plainly, however, this intimate acquaintance with one’s own culture can create as much blindness as insight. It can prevent the observer from seeing cultural assumptions and practices. The long interview presented here is deliberately designed to take advantage of the opportunity for insight and minimize the dangers of familiarity.

The third concerns the relationship between the researcher and the data. The key question here is: How can the researcher collect data that are both abundant and manageable? As we shall observe below, every qualitative interview is, potentially, a Pandora’s box generating endlessly various and abundant data. The problem is to control the kind and amount of these data without also artificially constraining or forcing their character. This long interview is designed to take account of this problem as well.

The fourth concerns the relationship between the researcher and the respondent. How is this delicate relationship best constructed and construed? The long interview is a highly unusual speech event, one that makes for a most peculiar social relationship. There is no question that certain aspects of this event and relationship must be very exactly crafted (and manipulated) to serve the interests of good qualitative inquiry. But we must also take care to observe the rights (formal and informal) of the respondent. The method presented here seeks to take advantage of the qualitative opportunity without also taking advantage of the respondent.

These are four problem areas that any methodology in the qualitative literature must contend with. We shall see that these problems areas diverge and intersect to form several different configurations. In order to deal with them individually and in concert, I have treated them below in the form of nine key issues.

Issue 1: The Social Scientific Research Community

What kind of relationship should exist between qualitative research and other methods of social scientific inquiry? There is no consensus here. Some qualitative researchers look for cooperation. Others have chosen a different posture. There are qualitative researchers who insist that they cannot fully belong to the social scientific world because they have been forced to live for so long at its margins. Some claim that they do not wish to belong because their qualitative methods give them privileged access to proprietary truths. Still others argue that they are already the secret elite of this world for it is only they who can grasp and use the magical methods of the qualitative tradition. Qualitative researchers have mustered several, quite flattering, arguments with which to distance themselves from the other social sciences.

The evidence for these “special status” arguments is largely artifactual. It is largely because there are few clear operational standards for training in, and the practice of, qualitative methods, that these methods are now used chiefly by a small group of scholars blessed with “special” abilities. Without these standards, qualitative researchers could not but remain a marginal presence in the social sciences. Without these standards, qualitative truths appeared somehow more evanescent than quantitative ones. Without these standards, qualitative methods were, necessarily, only within the reach of the “naturally” gifted.

It is, in other words, largely the failings of the field, not the special status of its practitioners, that have encouraged both “ghetto” protests and “magic circle” pretensions. Let us demonstrate that qualitative methods can be routinized and made accessible to all. As Merton, Fiske, and Kendall (1956: 17) insisted, some 30 years ago, qualitative interviewing is no “private and incommunicable art.”

It is time for the field of qualitative methods to make itself a full citizen of the social sciences. If the field fails to move from defensive postures to constructive ones, and if it fails to begin to systematize and routinize qualitative methods, it can expect to lose the constituency in the social scientific community that now looks to it with interest. It is time to stop proclaiming, and to start demonstrating, the value of qualitative methods. This is a critical moment in the development of qualitative methods because, in the forceful but apposite language of everyday speech, it is time for qualitative partisans to “put up or shut up.”

Issue 2: The Donor Social Sciences—A Call for Ecumenical Cooperation

But taking up full citizenship in the social sciences is only the first of the qualitative researcher’s new responsibilities. It is also necessary to bring the several “tribes” of the qualitative tradition into a state of useful cooperation. The goal of cooperation is complicated by the great diversity of approach that exists here. The development of each of these subgroups in the qualitative community has been fitful, divergent, and uncoordinated.

Sociology witnessed an explosion of activity in the 1950s.¹ Directed or inspired by the Chicago School (Thomas, 1983), researchers took these new methods into medical schools (Becker, 1956), Pentecostal churches (Von Hoffman and Cassidy, 1956), forbidden communities (Lezner, 1956), the homes of the upper classes (Seeley et al., 1956), and every nook and cranny of entire communities (Warner and Lunt, 1941). Much of this work was designed to aid in the practice of participant observation. But because it is also designed for the study of North American societies, we shall find it useful in this study of the long interview proposed here.

The winter of positivism that prevailed in the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s cut short much of sociology’s enthusiasm for qualitative methods. Indeed, these methods might have passed altogether from the field were it not for the vigorous and brilliant efforts of Glaser and Strauss (1965, 1968) and Schatzman and Strauss (1973). This work also presumes a participant observation mode, but is useful for the creation of a model of the long qualitative interview. One of the special virtues of this work, and one of the things that accounts for its wide spread influence in the social sciences, is the scheme it proposes for data analysis. This will be referred to below.

Happily, there is now a qualitative revival underway in sociology. This new generation of scholarship continues to concentrate on participant observation, but it now draws on several disparate traditions, including symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, hermenuetics, ethnomethodology, interpretive sociology, and antipositivists of all kinds.²

Psychology, another victim of the winter of positivism, has cultivated qualitative methods more routinely for clinical purposes than research ones (e.g., LaRossa and Wolf, 1985; Sullivan, 1954). Happily, this field is also beginning to show new interest in qualitative methods, and diverse theoretical orientations are at work here as well, including ethogenics, narrative psychology, and phenomenology.³

Anthropology, never the captive of positivist enthusiasms, helped to keep the qualitative faith alive in the 1950s and 1960s. However, for all of its practical commitment, it failed to formalize or articulate its methods. As a result, the field perhaps best situated to contribute to the methodological literature has contributed relatively little (Stocking, 1983: 112). With a few notable exceptions (e.g., DuBois, 1937; Kluckhohn, 1940; Paul, 1953), the field has, until recently, created a surprisingly thin methodological literature and virtually no pedagogical tradition (Nash and Wintrob, 1972). It is worth pointing out, for instance, that students passed through the master’s and Ph.D. programs in anthropology at a major American research university in the mid-1970s without taking so much as a single course in methodology. In the absence of this training, the field has relied on its own oral tradition to pass methods from one generation of scholars to the next. Just as often, each generation has had to reinvent these methods for itself. Happily, this methodological somnolence appears finally at an end.⁴

Evaluation research and administrative sciences also understood the value of qualitative methods at a time when other social sciences had forsaken them. These fields were, however, perhaps more reflexive and systematic than their anthropological brethren, and developed a rich theoretical and practical body of literature.⁵

Caught up in the preoccupations of positivism, consumer research has been unprepared, until recently, to credit any but the most limited range of qualitative methods as useful. Even here, in the development of the focus group, there has been substantially more concern with practice than theory.⁶ Recently, a broader range of qualitative methods has been developed and applied.⁷

The “fits and starts” development, and heterogeneous character, of the qualitative community has discouraged the creation of robust research agenda and well-worked theoretical models. Moreover, it has allowed each subgroup to neglect the work being done in other fields. The key issue here, then, is that future research must be coordinated and ecumenical. It is now longer enough to pursue research on an ad hoc basis, and it is no longer possible to ignore the research activities and accomplishments of other fields. Too little work has been done on this question for any of us to afford the luxury of disciplinary isolationism.

As this coordinated undertaking develops, it is worth wondering whether any particular social science will emerge as the central “donor discipline” for qualitative methods (as statistics now is for quantitative ones). It is possible that sociolinguistics will claim this position. It can already provide a very precise understanding of some of the mechanics of the qualitative interview (Briggs, 1986; Churchill, 1973), and none of the social sciences is better placed to judge the delicate and subtle interactive processes of which the interview consists.⁸ For these microcosmic issues, in any case, sociolinguistics has much to contribute.

There are many other fields that may someday exert an influence here. There is not yet an “anthropology of the interview” in anthropology, but this cannot be far off. There is also reason to think that someday...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Nine Key Issues
• 3. The Four-Step Method of Inquiry
• 4. Quality Control
• 5. The Writing-Up Process
• 6. Managing Qualitative Research
• 7. Conclusion
• Appendix A: Preliminary Questions for Qualitative Research Project
• Appendix B: Standard Ethics Protocol
• Appendix C: Budget Items and Calculations
• Appendix D
• Notes
• References
• About the Author