York's Hidden Stories

Interviews in Applied Linguistics

Rachel Wicaksono, Dasha Zhurauskaya

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781137558381
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137558398
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores the mechanics of storytelling within a study aimed at focusing on a 'hidden' population of migrants in the city of York, UK. Taking applied linguistics to mean the consideration of real-world 'problems' as identified by a 'client', in which the use of (and beliefs about) language is a significant component, the authors describe the benefits and challenges of working in a partnership with a community organisation. With project participants from Africa, Europe, Asia and South and Central America who had lived in York between two and fifty years, the study considers the co-construction of meaning in interviews from a range of practical and theoretical perspectives. The book will be of interest to students, academic researchers and community project leaders who are interested in migration stories and interviews as a method of data collection.

© The Author(s) 2020

R. Wicaksono, D. ZhurauskayaYork's Hidden Storieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55839-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Interviews: Perspectives from Applied Linguistics

Rachel Wicaksono¹ and Dasha Zhurauskaya²

(1)

School of Education, Language and Psychology, York St John University, York, UK

(2)

Independent Scholar, York, UK

Rachel Wicaksono (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of possible uses of interviews in applied linguistics. It begins by suggesting some reasons for the prevalence of interviews in our daily lives and for their popularity as a research instrument. The chapter explores a range of different theoretical perspectives on the collection and use of interview data. Focusing on the disciplinary context of applied linguistics, this chapter comments on the extent to which various approaches to interviewing meet the ‘requirements’ of the discipline.

Keywords

InterviewsApplied linguisticsNeo-positivistRomanticConstructionistTransformative

End Abstract

This chapter begins with a review of reasons for the use of interviews and some ways of analysing interview data. The second half of the chapter explores the disciplinary context in which we are working, applied linguistics, and comments on the extent to which various approaches to interviewing meet the ‘requirements’ of our discipline.

Why Interview?

Turn on the television, tune in to the radio or go online, and it is clear that interviews are a very important form of interaction in everyday life. As Atkinson and Silverman (1997: 304) have noted, we live in an ‘interview society’. Perhaps it is this familiarity with the genre that makes interviews such a common way for researchers to interact with their participants and ‘still the most preferred form of qualitative data’ (Silverman 2004: iii). But interviews are not only familiar, they are also often felt by researchers to be useful, flexible and easy to do (Talmy 2010). We could add that they are likely to be interesting, even fun, to do when the topic of the interview and the participants are chosen by the researcher, as they usually are.

So, as a way of collecting research data, interviews do not require any explaining or justifying to potential participants, who are very likely to already know exactly what is expected of them. However, this very familiarity with the idea of the interview is also a potential drawback of their use as a research instrument. Because we are surrounded by interviews, we are also desensitised to their form: structure, language, expectations, roles and so on (Mann 2011). Interviews, in other words, are part of the research furniture and, as such, could potentially be no longer noticeable or of interest. Fortunately however, the popularity of interviews in academic life is also reflected by the fact that their use, both as a method of data collection and a methodology, has become a topic of research in itself (e.g. Cicourel 1964; Kvale 2007; Talmy and Richards 2010; Roulston 2010; Talmy 2010, 2011; Roulston 2011; Mann 2016). Not allowing the interview to become just part of the research furniture, these scholars, and others, have, in ways that will be explored later in this chapter, re-sensitised us to the interview and its workings in and on our research.

In the next part of this section, we consider a range of different ways of thinking about interviews and how these different conceptualisations of the genre might influence a researcher’s reasons for interviewing. We have already noted how frequently interviews are to be found in everyday life and in academic research; they are generally thought to be useful, flexible, easy to organise and fun. Underpinning the idea that interviews are ‘useful’ are a wide range of assumptions about the ‘content’ they generate and the way in which this content gets generated, the role of the interviewer and other aspects of the interview (e.g. place and recording equipment), and the status of the interviewee as a person that can be separated both from the interviewer and from the context in which the interview takes place. Of the many possible ways of thinking about interviews, we have selected four to look at in some detail, and we very briefly mention a number of others for readers who may be interested in exploring these. The four conceptualisations we explore here are neo-positivist, romantic, constructionist and transformative. We have chosen these four because they are also the focus of a special issue of Applied Linguistics (Volume 32, Issue 1, 2011) that remains an important marker in the development of interview research in applied linguistics. In the next chapter of this book, we show how these four ways of thinking about interviews played out in the analysis of the interview data collected for the community project that forms the case study presented here. The brief mention of other approaches aims to point at potential future directions for interview research.

If interviews are ‘obviously’ useful, flexible, easy to do and (maybe) fun, why should we (community activists or academic researchers) bother to think in any further detail about why we are using them to do our work? Methods of data collection and analysis have themselves become topics for discussion in the research literature, with users explaining what their preferred methods can be used to achieve and advising other users not to be inconsistent (e.g. Talmy 2010) or to misunderstand or confuse methods and the reasons for their use (e.g. Braun and Clarke 2019). In participating in the community project that we present here, we noticed that our own reasons for doing interviews (and therefore our understanding of the meaning and possible uses of interview data) were different from (what we understood of) the project leaders’, and maybe the participants’, reasons and understandings. These differences seemed like more than just different beliefs about the same ‘thing’ but like beliefs about different things. Thinking about these things became part of our study. We say more about why they did in the section below on the disciplinary context of our study. As we say above, the four conceptualisations we explore in this chapter are neo-positivist, romantic, constructionist and transformative. We begin with the first two, both underpinned by the idea of the interview as a research instrument (Talmy 2010).

Neo-positivist reasons for choosing to interview are related to the assumption that interviews are an effective way of generating detailed accounts of events or thorough descriptions/explanations of beliefs and actions. Where the purpose of an interview is to uncover an accurate and detailed account, the interviewer is likely to consider themselves a neutral figure who, through careful preparation, aims to ask ‘good’ questions which reduce, or remove, bias in their findings. In this way, it is assumed, the interviewer produces good quality data that, in its straightforward relationship to the questions asked, is ‘valid’. According to Briggs (2007: 555), researchers working in this tradition commonly portray interviews as carefully structured to ‘elicit inner worlds with minimal intervention’. This approach to interviewing is one which seeks to ‘mine the attitudes, beliefs and experiences of self-disclosing respondents’ (Talmy and Richards 2010) who have been made to ‘forget about the [interview] event so that interviewers can access their “natural” behaviour’ (De Fina and Perrino 2011: 1). Interview responses are thus assumed to be, and presented as, direct representations of people’s thoughts and experiences (Silverman 2013). This rationale for interviews has been described as ‘you ask they answer, and then you know’ (Hollway 2005: 312).

Another version of these beliefs is that interviews are thought to be/presented as a way of generating ‘true confessions’, self-revelations about thoughts, actions, and attitudes to events, which would not be possible without the empathetic skill of the interviewer. Where the interviewer aims to access ‘true confessions’, they are required to actively establish a positive rapport with the interviewee, allowing for an intimate conversation that provides insight into the authentic life-world of the interviewee. In contrast, establishing such a relationship is not likely to be part of the practice of interviews that are conducted for the reasons described in the previous paragraph. Those interviewers who aim to elicit detailed and accurate acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Interviews: Perspectives from Applied Linguistics
• 2. Community Projects and Hidden Stories
• 3. Methodology
• 4. Analysis and Discussion
• 5. Conclusions
• Back Matter