Maybe it was just me being a little naive, but I never thought that there would be so much prep work that goes into using interviews as a research method! This may be because the only type of “interviews” (operationalization!) that I have had experience with are those of the job and volunteer positions variety. For these types of interviews, it seems that they have a rigid interview structure, consisting of questions and a predefined list of suitable answers. In this way, it is not at all similar to interviews used for research, where it is often valuable for the interviewer to discover something new and unheard of.
On the other hand, “fitting in” is something that can be applied to both types of interviews. When interviewing for a volunteer position, it is important to establish a connection with those who you will be working with. When it comes to conducting research, being able to fit in is essential in gaining the trust of participants so that the interviewer can hopefully extract the most honest responses from them.
Interesting observation, ek. Reading about interviews as a research method I never even thought about job interviews. I guess that's why I hate them so much (and I trust I'm not alone): they're not really interviews at all, in the sense that they not seek to glean any new information from their subject (i.e. me). Instead, they're social performances in which the way you speak, the way you dress, your demeanour, etc. take centre stage. What's said is secondary -- in my experience, the questions themselves are usually pretty farcical, with, as ek points out, very narrow range of pre-defined acceptable answers.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much is lost in transcriptions of interviews during social research projects. The way a person performs socially during an interview (dress, demeanour, etc.) will probably not translate well to a transcript. Even if a videotaped interview is not transcribed, but left in video form it will eventually be reduced to words on a page. What is the research value of this lost performative data? Does the social performance of interview subjects contain information that is useful for our social research projects?
If so, there's the problem of the interviewer's interpretation of the interview subject based on her or his own social sensibilities. I guess it can get pretty complicated ...