Making Interviews Meaningful
By Ann Langley FRSC and Nora Meziani
Qualitative methods have always played an important role in social research, with the one-on-one interview undoubtedly being the single most common data source. Indeed, the interview may seem so banal as not to require any further explanation. But are all interviews really alike? Is there one best way? More generally, how can social scientists make their interviews more ‘meaningful’ (and perhaps less banal…) in the light of their research goals? Our recent essay in Journal of Applied Behavioral Science sheds light on these key questions. We argue in fact, that interviewing is a more complex practice than usually thought. The main purpose of the essay is to sort out some of this complexity by (a) offering a typology of five genres of interviewing associated with different purposes, (b) providing suggestions about how interview practices may be designed to fit their purpose, and (c) offering some approaches to enriching interview practices more generally.
The Investigative Genre: Tracing Events
A first view of interviews is to see them as a way to collect “facts,” just as in crime investigation or in a courtroom with interviewees seen as “witnesses” to what occurred. This ‘investigative genre’ of interviewing highlights “who did what and when”. In our essay, we explore specific techniques such as event tracking, courtroom questioning, and non-directive questioning that are aimed at improving recall to obtain accurate accounts. We also discuss some concerns about this approach, such as the assumption that an objective truth exists, or that interviewing can ever really be neutral.
The Apprentice Genre: Articulating Tacit Knowledge
The apprentice genre differs from the investigative genre in that it is aimed at articulating embodied, practical and tacit knowledge, instead of explicit knowledge of events and activities, placing the interviewer in a kind of “apprentice role.” Using interviews for this task may sound counterintuitive, since the essential nature of tacit and embodied knowledge is that it escapes language. However, some inventive techniques have been developed to draw out this form of knowledge. Our essay discusses the advantages and limitations of these techniques, which include think-aloud interviews, critical incident techniques, and the “interview to the double.”
The Interpretive Genre: Constructing Meanings
The interpretive genre emphasizes interpretation and meaning construction rather than facts. This is perhaps the most commonly adopted perspective on interviewing, which aims to capture lived experience in all its richness, diversity, and complexity. We review some valuable interview techniques and practices for doing this satisfactorily, including clean language interviewing, introspection, and topic label avoidance. The flexibility of this genre allows researchers to adapt their protocols to the object of investigation within broad guidelines concerning open questioning and a listening stance. However, despite the high interest of this interview genre, it also raises some concerns, that are discussed in the essay.
The Discursive Genre: Revealing Communicative Practices
The discursive genre focuses on how people discursively construct their world through talk: it thus focuses on people’s communicative practices in interview situations. Indeed, during an interview, a lot of things are going on beneath the surface: self-justification, identity work, cultural discourses, and political maneuvering. These practices are the phenomena of interest in themselves in the discursive genre. With this perspective, scholars aim to dig beneath the surface of first level meanings. We discuss two notable ways of developing this kind of interview: narrative methods (e.g., life stories, self-portraits, narratives of practice, autobiographies) and the constructionist approach. While this interview genre invites scholars to conduct fine-grained data analysis, it may also raise some ethical issues, which we discuss further in our essay.
The Interventionist Genre: Stimulating Reflexivity
Enabling action and improvement is the main aim of the interventionist genre of interviewing. Interviews are seen here as a stimulus for reflexivity and knowledge generation for the interviewee as much as for the researcher. They focus on developing the interviewees’ potential and their effectiveness at work. In our paper, we discuss the strengths and limitations of two types of interview techniques: dialogic inquiry (which can be located within the broader umbrella of action research), and appreciative inquiry (which focuses on the positive aspects of the interviewees’ experiences).
Overall, our essay argues for the need to position what we are doing in interviews in relation to our research objectives. We also argue for greater methodological openness and inventiveness in the way we use traditional research methods such as interviews (e.g., by combining them with other methods and enriching them with material or visual artifacts), in order to make them more meaningful.
Article details
Making Interviews Meaningful
Ann Langley FRSC and Nora Meziani
First Published July 3, 2020 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/0021886320937818
The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science (JABS)
