The Active Interview

James A. Holstein, Jaber F. Gubrium

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN: 9780803958951
• eBook ISBN: 9781506319346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

"The book provides an academic basis for discussion and development of active interviewing methods. . . . The ideas raised. . . will be interesting and valuable to those involved in developing new methodologies in qualitative research and interviewing."

--Helen Masey in Social Research Association News

The interpretive turn in social science has taken the interview and turned it upside down. Once thought to be the pipeline through which information was transmitted from a passive subject to an omniscient researcher, the new "active interview" considers the interviewer and interviewee as equal partners in constructing meaning around an interview event. This changes everything - from the way of conceiving a sample to the ways in which the interview may be conducted and the results analyzed. In this brief volume, James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium outline the differences between the active interview and the traditional interview and give novice researchers clear guidance on conducting an interview that is the rich product of both parties.

Students and professionals who use qualitative methods in the fields of sociology, anthropology, communication, psychology, education, social work, gerontology, and management will find The Active Interview to be a helpful and cogent guidebook.

THE ACTIVE INTERVIEW

JAMES A. HOLSTEIN

Marquette University

JABER F. GUBRIUM

University of Florida

1. INTRODUCTION

Think of how much we learn about contemporary life by way of interviews. Larry King introduces us to presidents and power brokers. Barbara Walters plumbs the emotional depths of stars and celebrities. Oprah, Geraldo, and Donahue invite the ordinary, tortured, and bizarre to “spill their guts” to millions of home viewers, and intimates and experts tell the “O. J. Simpson Story” for TV and the tabloids.

We live in what has been called an “interview society” (Silverman, 1993). Not only the media but human service professionals and social researchers increasingly get their information via interviews. Some estimate that 90% of all social science investigations exploit interview data (Briggs, 1986). Interviewing seems to be the universal mode of systematic inquiry (Hyman, Cobb, Feldman, Hart, & Stember, 1975), as sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, clinicians, administrators, politicians, pollsters, and pundits treat interviews as their “windows on the world.”

Typically, those who are curious about another person’s feelings, thoughts, or experiences believe that they merely have to ask the right questions and the other’s “reality” will be theirs. Studs Terkel, the consummate journalist qua sociologist, says he simply turns on his tape recorder and asks people to talk. Of his brilliant interviewing study of attitudes and feelings about working, Terkel (1972) writes:

 

There were questions, of course. But they were casual in nature ... the kind you would ask while having a drink with someone; the kind he would ask you. ... In short, it was a conversation. In time, the sluice gates of dammed up hurts and dreams were open. (p. xxv)

 

As unpretentious as it is, Terkel’s image of interviewing permeates the social sciences: “prospecting” for true facts and feelings residing within. Of course, there is a highly sophisticated technology that tells researchers how to ask questions, what sorts of questions not to ask, the order in which to ask them, and the ways to avoid saying the wrong things that might spoil the data (Fowler & Mangione, 1990; Hyman et al., 1975). But the basic model remains similar to the one Terkel exploits so adroitly.

The image of the social scientific prospector casts the interview as a search-and-discovery mission, with the interviewer bent on finding what is already there inside variably cooperative respondents. The challenge lies in extracting information as directly as possible. Highly refined interview technologies streamline, standardize, and sanitize the process, but, despite their methodological sophistication, they persistently ignore the most fundamental of epistemological questions: Where does this knowledge come from, and how is it derived?

Social researchers generate massive data by asking people to talk about their lives; results, findings, or knowledge come from conversations. Although these conversations may be variously configured as highly structured, standardized, quantitatively oriented surveys, as semi-formal guided interviews, or as free-flowing exchanges, all interviews are interactional events. Their narratives may be as truncated as forced-choice survey answers or as elaborate as life histories, but, in any case, they are constructed in situ, a product of the talk between interview participants.

Most researchers recognize interviews as social interactions, but the literature on interview strategy and technique remains primarily concerned with maximizing the flow of valid, reliable information while minimizing distortions of what the respondent knows (Gorden, 1987). The interview conversation is thus framed as a potential source of bias, error, misunderstanding, or misdirection, a persistent set of problems to be minimized. The corrective is simple: If the interviewer merely asks questions properly, the respondent will emit the desired information.

This approach, however, continues to treat the interview conversation as a pipeline for transmitting knowledge. A recent “linguistic turn” in social inquiry—an interest shared by poststructuralist, postmodernist, constructionist, and ethnomethodological perspectives—has raised a number of questions about the sheer possibility of collecting knowledge in the manner this approach presupposes. In varied ways, these perspectives hold that meaning is socially constituted; all knowledge is created from the action taken to obtain it. This further suggests that what passes for knowledge is itself a product of interaction (Cicourel, 1964, 1974; Garfinkel, 1967). Treating interviewing as a social encounter leads us rather quickly to the possibility that the interview is not merely a neutral conduit or source of distortion but rather the productive site of reportable knowledge itself.

Sociolinguist Charles Briggs (1986) argues that the social circumstances of interviews are more than obstacles to respondents’ articulation of their particular truths. Briggs notes that, like all other speech events, interviews fundamentally, not incidentally, shape the form and content of what is said. Aaron Cicourel (1974) goes further, maintaining that interviews virtually impose particular ways of understanding reality on subjects’ responses. The emerging lesson is that interviewers are deeply and unavoidably implicated in creating meanings that ostensibly reside within respondents (see Manning, 1967).

Cicourel (1964, 1974) goes on to offer insightful and nuanced suggestions for how to make sense of typical interview interactions. Briggs (1986) focuses more on how to pose questions in ways that are appropriate and meaningful to respondents, acknowledging that question-answer exchanges both provide a context and call on cultural assumptions and local linguistic practices. Elliot Mishler (1986, 1991) presents the contextual and narrative complexities of the research interview, suggesting that narrative itself is cultural. These authors all point out the need to develop better understandings of the meanings that are being conveyed in practice by both interviewer and respondent, either to avoid misunderstandings or errors of interpretation or to cast interpretation as a social construction in its own right.

This points to a significant oversight in the typical approach: Both parties to the interview are necessarily and unavoidably active. Each is involved in meaning-making work. Meaning is not merely elicited by apt questioning nor simply transported through respondent replies; it is actively and communicatively assembled in the interview encounter. Respondents are not so much repositories of knowledge—treasuries of information awaiting excavation—as they are constructors of knowledge in collaboration with interviewers.

This book argues that all interviews are interpretively active, implicating meaning-making practices on the part of both interviewers and respondents. We contend that if interview data are unavoidably collaborative (Alasuutari, 1995; Holstein & Staples, 1992), attempts to strip interviews of their interactional ingredients will be futile. Instead of adding to the long list of methodological constraints under which interviews should be conducted, we take a more positive approach, proposing an orientation whereby researchers acknowledge interviewers’ and respondents’ constitutive contributions and consciously and conscientiously incorporate them into the production and analysis of interview data.

The book presents a perspective—an implicit theory of the interview—more than an inventory of methods. We are not suggesting that the “active” interview is a distinctive research tool; instead, we use the term to emphasize that all interviews are reality-constructing, meaning-making occasions, whether recognized or not. We offer a social constructionist approach (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Blumer, 1969; Garfinkel, 1967) that considers the process of meaning production to be as important for social research as the meaning that is produced. In other words, we think that understanding how the meaning-making process unfolds in the interview is as critical as apprehending what is substantively asked and conveyed. The hows, of course, refer to the interactional, narrative procedures of knowledge production, not merely to interview techniques. The whats pertain to the issues guiding the interview, the content of questions, and the substantive information communicated by the respondent. We return to this dual interest in the hows and whats of meaning production throughout the book.

Our perspective is clearly influenced by ethnomethodology and related approaches (see Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984; Pollner, 1987; Silverman, 1994). In many significant ways, it also resonates with methodological critiques and reformulations offered by an array of feminist scholars (see DeVault, 1990; Harding, 1987: Reinharz, 1992; Smith, 1987). In their distinctive ways, ethnomethodology, constructionism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and some versions of feminism are all interested in issues relating to subjectivity, complexity, perspective, and meaning construction. As valuable and insightful as these approaches are, they tend to emphasize the hows of social process at the expense of the whats of lived experience (cf. Williams, 1958/1993). We want to strike a balance between these hows and whats as a way of reappropriating the significance of substance and content to studies of the social construction process. Although the emphasis on process has sharpened concern with, and debate over, the epistemological status of interview data, it is important not to lose track of what is being asked about in interviews and, in turn, what is being conveyed by respondents. Too narrow a focus on how tends to displace the significant whats—the meanings and cultural material—that serve as the relevant grounds for what cultural studies critic Paul Willis (1990) would call the “symbolic work” of asking and answering questions.

This book offers some observations that are quite unconventional by most social science standards. As an explication of the theoretical and epistemological underpinnings of interviewing practices in general, it is more a conceptual sensitizing device than a formula for conducting a particular kind of interview. Consequently, the book might be of special interest to researchers seeking to better understand how interview data are produced and interpreted. Its procedural implications might prove especially useful in designing, executing, and interpreting interview studies that focus on meaning-making—both its process and product.

Taking the activity of all interviewing as our point of departure, the book discusses how the interview cultivates meaning-making as much as it “prospects” for information. In subsequent chapters, we locate this active view in relation to more traditional conceptions (Chapter 2) and examine alternate images of the subject behind the interview respondent (Chapter 3). We then discuss the complex bodies of experiential information that provide participants with resources from which they formulate responses (Chapter 4), showing how interviewers establish interpretive parameters for forthcoming exchanges and shape the way issues are addressed and answers are assembled (Chapter 5). We proceed to illustrate how participants link observations, experiences, and concepts to produce horizons of understanding for what is said (Chapter 6) and explore the ramifications of recognizing the multiple voices that can constitute the interview (Chapter 7). Finally, we conclude with a rethinking of standard methodological concerns in relation to the active interview (Chapter 8). Our discussion begins by situating the active interview in relation to more conventional understandings.

2. THE ACTIVE INTERVIEW IN PERSPECTIVE

Interviews vary in several important ways. C. A. Moser (1958), for example, distinguishes them along a functional continuum. At one end, he places interviews whose purpose is to interrogate, help, educate, or evaluate respondents—as in employment interviews or police investigations. Such inquiries are conducted with decidedly practical goals in mind. Interviews with more abstract or academic goals, like large-scale social surveys, occupy the opposite end of the continuum. Eleanor and Nathan Maccoby (1954) classify interviews according to how “standardized” they are, referring in part to whether an interview is guided by structured questions and an orientation to measurement or is more flexibly organized and aims to uncover subjective meanings. John Madge (1965) contrasts what he calls “formative” with “mass” interviews, categorizing them according to whether the respondent “is given some sort of freedom to choose the topics to be discussed and the way in which they are discussed” (p. 165). Formative interviews include the nondirective interviews favored in Rogerian counseling (see Rogers, 1945), informal interviews, and life histories. Most large-scale surveys fall into the mass interview category. By and large, classification centers on the characteristics and aims of the interview process, with little attention paid to how interviews differ as occasions for knowledge production.

The Imagined Subject Behind the Respondent

If only tacitly, there is always a model of the research subject lurking behind persons placed in the role of interview respondent. Considering the epistemological activity of the interview requires us to ask how interviewers relate to respondents, as imagined subjects, and to the conversations they have with those subjects. (Equally important, of course, are considerations of the subject behind the interviewer, to which we will turn later in the book.) Projecting a subject behind the respondent confers a sense of epistemological agency on the respondent, which bears on our understanding of the relative validity of the information that is reported.

In conventional approaches, subjects are basically conceived as passive vessels of answers for experiential questions put to respondents by interviewers. They are repositories of facts and the related details of experience. Occasionally, such as with especially sensitive interview topics or with recalcitrant respondents, researchers acknowledge that it may be difficult to obtain accurate experiential information. Nonetheless, the information is viewed, in principle, as held uncontaminated by the subject’s vessel of answers. The trick is to formulate questions and provide an atmosphere conducive to open and undistorted communication between the interviewer and respondent.

Much, if not most, of the methodological literature on interviewing deals with the nuances of these tricky matters. The vessel-of-answers view cautions interviewers to be wary of how they ask question, lest their manner of inquiry bias what lies within the subject, which otherwise is available for truthful and accurate communication. It offers myriad procedures for obtaining unadulterated facts and details, most of which rely on interviewer and question neutrality. For example, it is assumed that the interviewer who poses questions that acknowledge alternative sides of an issue is being more neutral than the interviewer who does not. Researchers are advised to take this into account in formulating interview questions. The successful application of such procedures elicits truths held in the vessel of answers behind the respondent. Validity results from the successful application of the procedures.

In the vessel-of-answers approach, the subject is epistemologically passive, not engaged in the production of knowledge. If the interviewing process goes “by the book” and is nondirectional and unbiased, respondents will validly emit what subjects are presumed to merely hold within them—the unadulterated facts and details of experience under consideration. Contamination emanates from the interview setting, its participants, and their interaction, not the subject, who, under ideal conditions, serves up authentic reports when beckoned to do so.

What happens, however, if we enliven the image of the subject behind the respondent? Construed as active, the subject behind the respondent not only holds facts and details of experience but, in the very process of offering them up for response, constructively adds to, takes away from, and transforms the facts and details. The respondent can hardly “spoil” what he or she is, in effect, subjectively creating.

This activated subject pieces experiences together, before, during, and after occupying the respondent role. As a member of society, he or she mediates and alters the knowledge that the respondent convey...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Active Interview in Perspective
• 3. Assigned Competence and Respondent Selection
• 4. Narrative Resources
• 5. The Active Interviewer
• 6. Constructing Meaning Within the Interview
• 7. Multivocality and Multiple Respondents
• 8. Rethinking Interview Procedures
• References
• About the Authors