Examining some discursive resources used in qualitative research interviews

Abstract

The general aim of this research was to describe some of the discursive practices for managing qualitative research interviews. The specific aim was to examine some regularities in the sequential organisation of a qualitative research interview that the participants use to make this talk orderly, meaningful, and accountable. A conversation analysis (cf., Sacks, 1992) of 266 lines of transcribed talk from New Zealand Interview 2 (van den Berg, Wetherell, & Houtkoop-Steenstra, 2003) on racism and race relations in New Zealand during the 1980’s was completed. The cumulative findings of four empirical studies of question formats, response tokens, simultaneous talk, and so-prefaced utterances conducted by Australian psychology honours students will be presented. Participants organise their co-presence in New Zealand Interview 2 using the normative rules for turntaking, repair, and adjacency pairs. Thus self and other are the basic parties to the conversation; the turn construction unit is the basic metric; and projected completion points are the local basis for speaker-change. Research interviewing is motile, locally involved, and so requires close cooperation between the participants. The interviewer and the respondent use social rules derived from ordinary, everyday conversations to manage questioning, answering, and other practical actions accomplished in the qualitative research interview. Thus, fine-grained analysis of actual talk shows that interviews are socially organised and culturally informed. This finding conflicts with conventional, neo-positive assumptions of a neutral interviewer and a passive respondent who is a vessel of answers that is common in social psychology.