The Problem-Centred Interview

Andreas Witzel, Herwig Reiter

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849201001, 9781849200998
• eBook ISBN: 9781446291597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides the first English language account of the interview method known as the PCI. Offering a way of collecting knowledge by means of involving people actively in the research process, the interviewer takes the role of a well-informed traveller. With careful preparation and planning, the interviewer sets out with priorities and expectations, but the story the interviewer tells about his journey depends on the people encountered along the road.

Novice and experienced interview researchers across the social, educational and health sciences will find this an invaluable guide to conducting interviews.

Andreas Witzel is senior researcher (retired) at the University of Bremen and former director of the Bremen Archive for Life Course Research.

Herwig Reiter is senior researcher in the Department of Social Monitoring and Methodology of the German Youth Institute in Munich.

1

INTRODUCTION

People tend to gain and communicate much of their knowledge by means of language. For instance, if we want to know something about the latest play at our favourite theatre, we may hear about it on local TV or radio, we can read about it in local newspapers, or we can ask friends that have been there and they may give us their opinion. The fact that asking somebody else is a common way of obtaining knowledge about something is the reason for the unbroken relevance of ‘interviewing’. As Brinkmann (2008: 471) writes: ‘We can presuppose that humans have interviewed each other in some form or other for as long as they have mastered the use of language.’ In other words, qualitative research interviewing makes use of the ancient human habit of asking and answering questions. It is a well-tried and reliable way of finding out about things and about each other in conversations.

Yet there are different ways of doing it. Since the first half of the twentieth century, when interviewing entered the more systematic discussion about social research methods, as Platt (2001) shows in her historical review of the status of interviewing in social research in the USA, many different techniques of interviewing have been developed. They all make specific suggestions about how to collect and construct knowledge. For instance, going back to the scenario about the play, it makes a difference whether we simply invite our friends to tell us how it was, or whether we confront them instead with a list of specific questions regarding the length of the interpretation, the number of people who left during the first break, the availability of beer, or the temperature in the theatre. While such specific questions may be important for us to decide whether we want to attend the performance, they may not help us find out what our friends actually thought about the play. Kvale and Brinkmann (2009: 48–50) introduce two metaphors for describing and contrasting these two ways of obtaining knowledge. They distinguish between the interviewer as a miner and a traveller. The miner-interviewer has a targeted and well-defined interest in specific informations she considers valuable: she knows what to look for and turns this (re)search into a collection of pure ‘nuggets of knowledge’ (ibid.: 48). Afterwards she will decide what it is actually worth. Alternatively, the traveller-interviewer is openly curious. She ‘wanders through the landscape’ (ibid.) of the area under investigation, involves herself in conversations, and encourages people to tell her about their experiences. With each conversation she may discover new aspects, and develop and modify her opinion. Together with the respondents encountered, she interactively co-constructs the knowledge that she will take home.

Both approaches produce useful knowledge but also involve certain disadvantages. On the one hand, chances are low that the miner, who corresponds to a systematic collector of scientific knowledge according to pre-defined standards, will be open to changing her assessment criteria and reflect upon the concept of what (using the mining metaphor) ‘precious metal’ is. On the other hand, it may be difficult for the traveller to come to the end of her journey; she may be overwhelmed by the many new impressions and perspectives she has encountered, and may even forget about her original interest.

Metaphors are a useful way of imagining interview research (Alvesson, 2011). This book is about a third way of collecting knowledge – by involving people more actively into a process of knowledge constitution. In the context of the problem-centred interview (PCI), interviewers take the role and attitude of a well-informed traveller: they have certain priorities and expectations and start the journey on the basis of background information obtained beforehand. Yet the trip they will finally make, and the story they will tell about it afterwards, depend on the people they meet on the road and on their insider knowledge. By talking to them they are able to refine their assessment of the major sights mentioned in the travel guide. Their guidebook only helped them to outline a preliminary roadmap and frame of reference that remains open to modification and revision on the basis of conversations with the locals. It is through these conversations that they get a better idea about what is relevant and worth seeing. Box 1.1 illustrates this interaction.

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Box 1.1

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A short story about well-informed travelling

Imagine the following scenario. You travel to a small mediaeval town in the south of France that is highly recommended in your travel guide. You get up early and visit a small local café for breakfast. One of the locals, a retired teacher, notices you studying a travel guide of his home town and involves you in a conversation. You tell him that you are here to get an impression of how town life may have been organised a few hundred years ago, and what is still left of it. You refer to your travel guide and other preparations you made in advance, and explain that you want to start your exploration at the main square in front of the church. From there, you would march along the bank of the river and then along the remains of the city wall to the old market square and the city hall.

The teacher is surprised about your plans and offers to take you on an alternative tour that starts at an old tree outside the former city wall where the main gate used to be. You find out that the story of the old tree and the Roman grave that its shadow covers is crucial for how the town’s main roads were organised towards the old market square in a way that they crossed the river where it was narrowest. The old tree also used to be the place where, over hundreds of years, many convicted criminals and ‘witches’ were executed – it is in walking distance to the church, whose crypt served as dungeons. Even today, the significance of the old tree can still be seen. For instance, every festival begins with a small parade starting at the old tree and proceeding to the market square where it is welcomed by the mayor from the balcony of the city hall; agreements with neighbouring towns are symbolically signed under the old tree; and it is popular among local youths who carve hearts and oaths of love into its trunk, although this has long been forbidden by the authorities. With an apologetic smile and putting his arm around the tree like an old friend, the teacher confesses to having done his fair share of carving on the tree. And sometimes he even visits the place with his wife or his grandchildren to talk about the old times and to search for fading traces of his very own marks.

After three intensive hours of talking to the former teacher, asking him about details and being guided through the town, you understand that the church, river banks, city walls, market square and city hall are all relevant sights and worthwhile exploring, just as your travel guide suggested (it does not mention the multi-purpose function of the crypt though). Yet the way they are arranged can only be understood in the historical perspective represented by the old tree and reproduced in contemporary local habits. With its much broader orientation towards relevant sights, the travel guide does not mention the old tree and its importance in the arrangement of these sights. For that, local knowledge is necessary.

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As a way of research, well-informed travelling is not about drifting through a (social) space of knowledge and meaning. On the contrary, it requires a lot of preparation in terms of both substance and behaviour. Think about the example above (Box 1.1): local cafés are good places for an ‘explorative’ breakfast as they are usually places where locals hang out; the opportunity to talk to a teacher is gladly taken as teachers are famously knowledgeable and ready to communicate their knowledge; the hunch that the arrangement of significant buildings usually follows certain standards is taken from the travel guide and academic books about urban planning in the middle ages; and a guided tour by a local insider is the perfect way of investigating the contemporary significance of mediaeval urban planning and its practical implications. The search process for this research was purposefully designed and at least the substantive preparation and some of the initial steps were also done on purpose.

The technique of the PCI that translates this idea of well-informed travelling into a methodological and practical programme of research could be a good approach for you if:

• you identified interviewing as the appropriate way of collecting information regarding a certain issue;
• the issue refers to a research question regarding the what, how and why of actions, appraisals and opinions;
• you have an idea about people who could provide you with first-hand insights into this topic; and
• your interview partners are willing to allow you to collect their extensive knowledge in order to understand their perspective in as much detail as possible.

In terms of a preliminary definition, the PCI can be described as a qualitative, discursive-dialogic method of reconstructing knowledge about relevant problems. This definition involves a few peculiarities. The discursive-dialogic character is outlined above in the idea of well-informed travelling and the involvement of interviewers and their knowledge in a dialogue with respondents and their perspectives. The discussion of this dialogue as an epistemological challenge (a task of obtaining knowledge about something) is done in Chapter 2 together with a reflection of the specificity of social (scientific) knowledge. Suggesting a particular way of reconstructing the meaningfulness of this knowledge through interviews, which is the purpose of the whole book, defines the PCI as a method: it is a ‘stylized way of conducting research that comprise(s) routine and accepted procedures for doing the rigorous side of science’ (see Abbott, 2004: 13). Like other methods of qualitative research, the PCI involves an ‘exchange between real people’ in their own ‘social, cultural, and physical context’. It focuses on meanings and behaviour, which the researcher tries to understand ‘through the eyes and lived experience of the people’ (Schensul, 2008: 521–2).

But what are the ‘problems’ in problem-centred interviews?

First of all, PCIs do not necessarily deal with issues that are ‘problematic’. That would be a misunderstanding of the term. The French notion of problématique or the German term Problemstellung refers to a specific research question – this would be a more appropriate meaning for the ‘problem’ in problem-centred interviews. Let us consider the original research puzzle that led to the development and design of the PCI as a distinct technique of qualitative interviewing. When the first author wrote his PhD thesis (Witzel, 1982) in the 1970s he was involved in a research project about occupational socialization of young people (Heinz et al., 1979). The purpose of the study was the investigation of the perspectives of graduates from a (lower) secondary modern school and their parents regarding the ‘problem’ of finding an occupation. The study wanted to explore these perspectives as authentically as possible and without theoretical preconceptions. The PCI was the genuine method developed for this very purpose on the basis of a review of methodological and methodical discussions available at that time (see below).

As research is usually not initiated by people themselves, the first step in addressing the research question of this study in terms of problem centring was taken by researchers. Thus, the starting point here was the identification of a societal problem with immediate relevance for individuals: the conditions and patterns of transitions of graduates from lower secondary education into the world of work in relation to their familial socialization and other influencing factors. The assumption was that, in the process of occupational orientation (of the child), the researcher would be able to address issues of socialization within families, simply because these issues were relevant to family members. The main challenge and task of the PCI was then to take the perspective of the teenager and his or her parents seriously and to trace their own criteria of assessing and making sense of the problem in this period of their lives, within this rough thematic frame of reference.

This first reason for naming the interviewing method according to its orientation towards socially relevant problems is immediately associated with a key precondition of conducting PCIs: the research question has to correspond to an everyday problem in the perspective of practical knowledge that the respondent can articulate and also has an interest in dealing with. This is an important step towards realising the PCI’s endeavour of learning about the real motivations behind actions. In order to bridge the scientific and the practical knowledge without corrupting the respondent’s perspective on the problem, the researcher’s perspective needs to be systematised and disclosed. In this way, the term ‘problem-centred’ underlines the method’s programmatic opposition to naive empiricism that promotes radical openness and assumes that meaning will emerge only if interviewers restrain themselves (for a critique, see Kelle, 2005). The term also refers to the practical aspects of the method (see section 2.3). All strategies and activities – ranging from access to the field to forms of communication – are oriented systematically, but flexibly, towards the research problem, i.e. the object, as well as to the most effective way of disclosing and understanding the respondent’s perspective on the problem. Throughout this book we describe the consequences of the PCI’s original dialogic perspective on problems on the basis of three examples (cf. Box 1.2 and Table 6.1). They are taken from very different studies that employed PCIs and should explicate the dependence of the choice and implementation of the method on the research object (see the principle of object orientation in section 2.3).

Finally, the aspect of ‘centring’ the problem has caused some confusion in the reception of the technique. It was sometimes interpreted in the sense of a limitation of the topic – it was associated with legitimising strategies of interviewers to bring respondents back on track in case they strayed off topic. Instead, problem centring means that the respondent is encouraged and supported in reconstructing research problems by means of reconstructing practical problems. In the process of a dialogue characterised by mutual trust, the respondent should gradually remember more and more and unfold the overall problem in narrative accounts. This entails the establishment of a focus of the reconstruction of meaning on all crucial aspects of the problem involving the breadth and depth that are appropriate for the topic. And there is no reason to expect respondents to stray off topic here.

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Box 1.2

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Studying problems: three examples

Throughout the book we refer to three examples from our own experience in conducting PCIs. They are mainly taken from three very different research contexts introduced below. As we were (leading) researchers in these projects, we can inform about every aspect without reservation and generalise our reflections about particular challenges, pitfalls and mistakes involved. These studies differ in terms of scope, duration, funding and human resources, etc. and are thus able to illustrate the wide range of challenges when using this method (see Table 6.1 for a comparative overview).

In the first, STUDY A, PCIs were used in the frame of a longitudinal, mixed-methods study. It investigated the job entry of young adults after completing vocational education in the German apprenticeship system and their successive careers regarding gender and class differences. In the second, STUDY B, PCIs were used for expert interviews in the frame of a short, commissioned and applied investigation of rising costs after the reform of custodianship of adults in the German federal state of Lower Saxony. In a peer research approach, judges were trained to interview judges. STUDY C was a PhD thesis and used PCIs in the frame of investigating meanings of unemployment in the post-communist context of Lithuania in the perspective of young people in transition to the world of work. The research puzzle and societal problem consisted here in the fact that the transformation from state socialism to market economy brought an end to decades of full employment and introduced mass unemployment as a new problem for both society and individuals. STUDIES A and C had a common interest in the issue of youth transitions, which originally motivated the development of the technique of the PCI.

Examples are integrated throughout the book and the reader will learn more and more details about these studies as she moves through the text. The general chapters of the book (3 to 5) include mostly examples from STUDIES A and C. They help to illustrate the basic methodical aspects of the PCI. Chapter 6 complements this general perspective and is dedicated to extensive discussions of examples from STUDIES A and B, which also serve as the basis for the discussion of typical interviewing errors and pitfalls.

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Background and use of the PCI

The development of the PCI has its origin in the German tradition of qualitative research and the methods discourse of the 1970s and 1980s (Mey and Mruck, 2007). In its very first version, the PCI was introduced as a comprehensive mixed-methods approach combining interviewing with case analyses, group discussions and biographical elements (Witzel, 1982). In this book, we will only discuss the intervi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of boxes, figures, tables and pitfalls
• About the authors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The programme of the PCI
• 3 Preparing PCIs
• 4 Doing PCIs
• 5 Processing PCIs
• 6 Examples of working with PCIs
• 7 A final note on PCI errors and pitfalls
• 8 Appendices
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index