Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of boxes
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The arc of Naturalistic Inquiry
- 1 On Naturalistic Inquiry: Key Issues and Practices
- 2 Theorizing Society: Grounded Theory in Naturalistic Inquiry
- 3 Looking at Society: Observing, Participating, Interpreting
- 4 Talking about Society: Interviewing and Casual conversation
- 5 Reading Society: Texts, Images, Things
- 6 Disentangling Society: The Analysis of Social Networks
- 7 Not Getting Lost in Society: On Qualitative Analysis
- 8 Telling about Society: On Writing
- Epilogue: Present and Future of Naturalistic Inquiry
- References
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
4 - Talking about Society: Interviewing and Casual conversation
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of boxes
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The arc of Naturalistic Inquiry
- 1 On Naturalistic Inquiry: Key Issues and Practices
- 2 Theorizing Society: Grounded Theory in Naturalistic Inquiry
- 3 Looking at Society: Observing, Participating, Interpreting
- 4 Talking about Society: Interviewing and Casual conversation
- 5 Reading Society: Texts, Images, Things
- 6 Disentangling Society: The Analysis of Social Networks
- 7 Not Getting Lost in Society: On Qualitative Analysis
- 8 Telling about Society: On Writing
- Epilogue: Present and Future of Naturalistic Inquiry
- References
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
Summary
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 conversation.
– Studs TerkelHumans are talking animals; and naturalistic inquirers pay careful attention, therefore, to what they say. Humans are not the only animals to talk – dolphins for example produce clicks, burst-pulse sounds, and whistles. The burst-pulse sounds and especially the whistles function as symbols: they are auditory stimuli produced by dolphins, directed at other dolphins, standing for something else. Taken together, they form a system of communication, a language. If only we could speak dolphinese – and if we were much better swimmers – we would be able to understand dolphin society (see Herzing, 2013; Herman, 2002; and compare Midgley, 2005). However, many of us speak English or Chinese, some of us speak Dutch or Swahili, and almost all of us can choose to learn other languages. Through human language, we have privileged access to human society. We tend to take this access for granted. The interview therefore has become the preferred tool of social scientists. Perhaps too much so – the interview and especially the so-called survey interview or questionnaire has become the routine data collection method in sociology, in public opinion research, and in communication research, crowding out other methods and making us forget that survey interviewing is a highly artificial genre. Even the more naturalistic varieties of interviewing to be discussed below may in fact be more mysterious than we tend to assume. It is for that reason that we briefly alluded to the difficulty of decoding communication between dolphins: interpreting human communication may be more difficult than we assume. According to the psychotherapist George Grosz, decoding communication between people can sometimes be as difficult as decoding tapping on a wall (Grosz, 2013: xii). In this chapter, we briefly sketch the history of the interview in social science; we present three approaches to interviewing that are often used in naturalistic inquiry: the open interview, the life story interview, and the active or creative interview; we argue that the most naturalistic form of interviewing humans in fact is… having a conversation; along the way and at the end we provide some practical advice.
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- Doing Qualitative ResearchThe Craft of Naturalistic Inquiry, pp. 89 - 112Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2015