Doing Interviews (9781526426079) by Brinkmann Svend; Kvale Steinar & Steinar Kvale

Author:Brinkmann, Svend; Kvale, Steinar & Steinar Kvale [Brinkmann, Svend; Kvale, Steinar & Kvale, Steinar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526426079
Publisher: LightningSource
Published: 2017-09-13T05:11:28+00:00

Source: Bellah et al. (1985, p. 304).

In the interview sequence in Box 6.3 the interviewer tries to discover at what point the subject would take responsibility for another human being. After a series of questions it is only when asked about responsibility for her own children that the respondent’s initial claim that she is only responsible for her own acts is challenged. The Socratic stance in the interview is described in this way: ‘Though we did not seek to impose our ideas on those with whom we talked, … we did attempt to uncover assumptions, to make explicit what the person we were talking to might have left implicit’ (Bellah et al., 1985, p. 304).

Bourdieu et al. likewise confronted the subjects in their study of social suffering among the downtrodden in France. In the interview sequence in Box 1.3, Bourdieu’s compassion for the plight of the young men did not prevent him from posing inquisitive questions and proposing conflicting interpretations of their accounts. This included direct questions such as ‘You are not telling the whole story’, and leading questions to information suspected withheld: ‘What were you doing, bugging him?’. In an outline of his interview approach ‘Understanding’ in an appendix to The Weight of the World, Bourdieu also compares his interviewing to Socrates’s questioning: ‘The “Socratic” work of aiding explanations aims to propose and not to impose. To formulate suggestions sometimes explicitly presented as such (“you don’t mean that …”) and intended to offer multiple, open-ended continuations to the interviewee’s argument, to their hesitations or searching for appropriate expression’ (Bourdieu et al., 1999, pp. 614–15).

The utilization of confrontational interview forms depends upon the subjects interviewed; to some subjects strong challenges to their basic belief may be an ethical transgression, while confident respondents, such as elite interviewees, may be stimulated by the intellectual challenges. A confrontational interview may thus approximate a mutual and egalitarian relationship where both parties pose questions and give answers, with a reciprocal criticism of what the other says. The research interview may then become a conversation, which stimulates interviewee and interviewer to formulate their ideas about the research topics, to learn and to increase their knowledge of the subject matter of inquiry.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.