qualitative interviews in applied linguistics

7/25/2019 Qualitative Interviews in Applied Linguistics

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Annual Review of Applied Linguistics(2010), 30, 128148.

Cambridge University Press, 2010, 0267-1905/10 $16.00doi:10.1017/S0267190510000085

Qualitative Interviews in Applied Linguistics: FromResearch Instrument to Social Practice

Steven Talmy

Interviews have been used for decades in empirical inquiry across the social

sciences as one or the primary means of generating data. In applied linguistics,interview research has increased dramatically in recent years, particularly inqualitative studies that aim to investigate participants identities, experiences,beliefs, and orientations toward a range of phenomena. However, despite theproliferation of interview research in qualitative applied linguistics, it has be-come equally apparent that there is a profound inconsistency in how the inter-view has been and continues to be theorized in the field. This article criticallyreviews a selection of applied linguistics research from the past 5 years thatuses interviews in case study, ethnographic, narrative, (auto)biographical, andrelated qualitative frameworks, focusing in particular on the ideologies of lan-guage, communication, and the interview, or the communicable cartographies

of interviewing, that are evident in them. By contrasting what is referred toas an interview as research instrument perspective with a research interviewas social practice orientation, the article argues for greater reflexivity aboutthe interview methods that qualitative applied linguists use in their studies,the status ascribed to interview data, and how those data are analyzed andrepresented.

INTRODUCTION

Interviews have been used for decades in empirical inquiry across the socialsciences as one or the primary means of generating data. In applied linguistics,interview studies have increased dramatically in recent years, particularly re-search that adopts case study, ethnographic, narrative, (auto)biographical, andrelated qualitative frameworks. This developing literature continues to addressa rich array of topics and to yield notable insights concerning research par-ticipants identities, experiences, beliefs, attitudes, and orientations toward arange of phenomena. However, despite the proliferation of interview research

in qualitative applied linguistics, it has become equally apparent in recent yearsthat there is a profound inconsistency in how the interview has been and

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CARTOGRAPHIES OF COMMUNICABILITY IN THE INTERVIEW SOCIETY

Although interviews have become a method of choice in a great deal of qual-itative applied linguistics research, the scarcity of material that addresses

how they might be theorized is quite curious (Wooffitt & Widdicombe, 2006,p. 32), especially since there is no shortage of methodologically oriented textsconcerning how interviews should be conducted. The comparative lack of con-sideration of the ontological, epistemological, and ideological assumptions un-derpinning interviews in applied linguistics and elsewhere has been traced totheir ubiquity in contemporary social life: as Briggs (1986) argued, becausethe interview is an accepted speech event in our own. . .speech communities,we take for granted that we know what it is and what it produces (p. 2; alsosee Mishler, 1986, p. 23). Atkinson and Silverman (1997, pp. 304305) similarlylocated the stubbornly persistent . . . special faith that many researchers place

in the interview to what they call the contemporary interview society, whereinterviews are a pervasive feature of the discursive landscape: indeed are ev-erywhere (Sarangi, 2003, p. 69). The contemporary uses of the interview have,Atkinson and Silverman (1997, pp. 309310) maintained, give[n] researchers,amid a diversity of methodological and epistemological positions, a spurioussense of stability, authenticity, and security. This has led to

the widespread, sometimes uncritical, adoption of the interview, andan unreflective endorsement of the core assumptions of the interviewsociety. . . .[whereby] unexamined models of the social actor and of theresearch process [are implicitly introduced] into the particular stylesof interviewing that [researchers] recommend (Atkinson & Silverman,1997, p. 310).

The core assumptions of the interview society can be explicated in termsof what Briggs (2007a, 2007b) called the cartographies of communicabilitythatconstitute particular conceptualizations of interviewing. A communicable car-tography of interviewing is essentially a conceptual map consisting of certainideologies of language, communication, and the institution of the interview,which are temporally and spatially located, and which produce certain (con-testable) social roles, subject positions, agency, and social relations that allow

individuals in the interview society tomake sense of interviews and interviewdata, tounderstand what they are, and to interpretthem as particular kinds ofsocial phenomena. Communicable cartographies of interviewing can also worktonaturalizeandprojectthemselves, to ensure their continued circulation.

Briggs (2007a) argued that three particular ideologies of language and com-munication have converged in a communicable cartography of interviewingthat has been naturalized in contemporary times: language as a transparentmedium, separation of the private from the public spheres, and a nostalgiafor the supposedly primordial face-to-face basis of communication and sociallife. Interviews from this perspective magically appear to embody all three ide-

ologies, producing discourse that seems to transform inner voices into publicdiscourse by constructing particular types of subjectivity and inducing subjects


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QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS 131

to reveal their inner voices (attitudes, beliefs, experiences, etc.) (pp. 553554).

I use the label interviews as research instrument to refer to a similar com-municable cartography of interviewing, as it is manifested in qualitative applied

linguistics. As a research instrument, interviews are theorized (often tacitly) as aresource for investigating truths, facts, experience, beliefs, attitudes, and/or feel-ings of respondents. Language tends to be conceptualized in referential terms,as a neutral medium that reflects or corresponds to objective or subjectivereality (Alvesson, 2003; Baker, 2002; Briggs, 1986; Holstein & Gubrium, 1995;Richards, 2003; Roulston, 2010; Sarangi, 2003; Silverman, 2001). Interview dataare ontologically ascribed the status of reports of respondents biographical,experiential, and psychological worlds, with the interview thus conceptualizedas the epistemological conduit to those worlds: the interviewer reveals whatreally happened, or what participants actually felt through the technology

of the interview, with closer approximations of reality depending on the inter-viewers skill at developing rapport, for example, or not asking leading questions.(Neo)positivist approaches such as survey or structured interviewing take theinterview as research instrument perspective (see Alvesson, 2003; Roulston,2010), as do naturalistic (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), romantic (Alvesson, 2001),or emotionalist (Silverman, 2001) approaches, such as those utilizing so-called open-ended or in-depth interview methods, which suggest that it ispossible. . .to unravel a deeper or more essential reality (van den Berg et al.,2003, p. 3) than allowed by structured interviewing.

Clearly,interviews as social practice share with the interview as research in-strumentperspective an interest in generating research data for the purpose ofanalysis, answering research questions, a concern with interview techniques,and so forth. However, the former position departs from the latter by problema-tizing the assumptions that constitute the research instrument perspective, andtreating interviews themselves as topics for investigation (also see Sarangi, 2003;see Table 1). In this respect, the research interview as social practice orientationaligns with Holstein and Gubriums (1995,inter alia) well-known active interview.In terms similar to Silverman (2001), Holstein and Gubrium (2003) contrastedthe active interview with conventional approaches by arguing that the latterprivilege thewhatsof the interview, that is, the interview content, whereas ac-tive interviews are interested in both thewhats and hows, that is, the content and

the interactional [and] narrative procedures of knowledge production (p. 68).Holstein and Gubrium argued that conceiving of the interview as a fundamentallysocial encounter rather than a conduit for accessing information means that theinterview becomes a site of, and occasion for, producing reportable knowledge(p. 68). Further, by activating the subject behind the respondent, the inter-viewee is transformed from a passive vessel of answers to someone who notonly holds facts and details of experience, but, in the very process of offeringthem up for response, constructively adds to, takes away from, and transformsthe facts and details (p. 70). In this respect, bias and distortion, validity andreliability, topics of great concern in (neo)positivist and naturalistic theories of

interview are transformed since the respondent can hardly spoil what he orshe is, in effect subjectively creating (p. 70; also see Briggs, 1986, pp. 2123).2


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Table 1. Contrasting conceptualizations of the research interview

Interview as research instrumentResearch interview as social

practice

Status ofinterview

A tool or resource forcollecting or gatheringinformation.

A site or topic for investigationitself.

Status ofinterviewdata

Data are reports, which revealtruths and facts, and/or theattitudes, beliefs, and interior,mental states of self-disclosingrespondents.

Data are accounts of truths,facts, attitudes, beliefs, interior,mental states, etc.,coconstructed betweeninterviewer and interviewee.

Voice Interviews give voice tointerviewees.

Voice is situationallycontingent and discursivelycoconstructed between

interviewer and interviewee.Bias Interviewers must strive to

obviate data contamination.Reflexive recognition that data

are collaboratively produced(and analysis of how they are);data cannot therefore becontaminated.

Analyticapproaches

Content or thematic analysis,summaries of data, and/orstraightforward quotation,either abridged or verbatim, i.e.,the data speak for themselves.

Data do not speak forthemselves; analysis centers onhow meaning is negotiated,knowledge is coconstructed,and interview is locally

accomplished.Analytic Product-oriented. Process-oriented.focus What. What and how.

Analyzing not only the whats, or theproduct of the interview, but also thehows, or theprocessinvolved in the coconstruction of meaning, has significantimplications for data analysis. In conventional approaches, analysis of interviewdata often takes form in content or thematic analysis, systematically groupingand summarizing the descriptions of experience produced by respondents by

common themes or content categories, such that their interpretive activityis subordinated to the substance of what they report. In an active interviewanalysis, by contrast, [t]he focus is as much on the assembly process as onwhat is assembled (Holstein & Gubrium, 2003, p. 78; cf. Braun & Clarke, 2006).A range of analytic approaches can be adopted for this undertaking but all insome way account for the fundamental sociality of the interview.

INTERVIEWS AS RESEARCH INSTRUMENT IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

There is an impressive diversity of topics addressed by qualitative applied lin-

guistics studies that conceptualize interviews as a research instrument. For thisreason, the discussion in this section is organized by the qualitative approach


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that authors indicated they adopted, using the following subheadings: ethno-graphic and case study research; narrative/life-history research; and a moregeneric class of interview studies that were identified as qualitative, or were notidentified at all.

Ethnographic and Case Study Research

Interviews are frequently used in ethnography and case studies, employed intandem with methods such as participant observation and document analysis asa means of developing in-depth understandings of phenomena through triangu-lation (by method and source) (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Inthis respect, it might come as a surprise that only a minority of the studies thatwere reviewed here presented findings based on an evident synthesis of theresearch methods employed. Among them was Vickerss (2007) ethnography

of the second language (L2) language socialization of an Indonesian electricalengineering student into the practices of a community of student engineers.Featuring a sophisticated design that included participant observation, inter-views, document analysis, playback sessions of videorecorded team meetings,and micro-analysis of face-to-face interaction, the study traced the developmentof the focal students participation in project team meetings, using interviewdata to provide important contextual information about the participants per-spectives on the project and each other. In Rankin and Beckers (2006) actionresearch case study, observational data were similarly integrated with writtenstudent and teacher reflections, stimulated recall sessions of videorecordedclasses, and interviews in a small-scale investigation of a German as a foreignlanguage teachers oral corrective feedback practices. Interviews in this studywere used to trace the long-term development of [the teachers] thinking abouthis provision of the practice in question. In Creeses (2006) ethnographic studyof an English as a second language (ESL) teacher and a subject teacher who werepartnered in a secondary geography class, interviews were used to documentthese teachers contrasting views of their pedagogical roles and responsibilities.Having thus set the scene (p. 444), the two teachers views were then comparedin an analysis of their actions in the actual classroom.

More typical of the ethnographic and case study research that was reviewedwas the relative foregrounding of interviews from a larger ethnographic project,

with these data composing the majority of the data presented (in some cases,the only data). As in the studies reviewed earlier, interviews were used mostoften as a means of accessing and presenting participants beliefs, attitudes,perceptions, and experiences. For example, in Mothas (2006) critical feministethnography about the links between ESL and (neo)colonialism, data from in-terviews, conversations, and afternoon teas served as the primary record, usedto listen to voices that have traditionally been delegitimized within educationalresearch (p. 80), as four practicing teachers and the researcher discussedmonolingualism, assimilationism, and linguicism in public schools. Canagara-jahs (2008) ethnography concerning the role of the family in processes of lan-

guage shift in three Sri Lankan disaporic communities, used interviews to gainan emic or insider perspective on how the community explains its language


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choice and attitudes (p. 148). Interviews also predominated in Golombek andJordans (2005) case study (data from reaction papers were provided, too, al-though it is not always clear which data came from which source). These datawere used to present the thoughts and beliefs of two Taiwanese preservice L2

English teachers during and following a poststructuralist pronunciationpedagogy course, as they confronted such (language) ideologies as the nativespeaker myth and worked to assert their right (p. 514) to teach English pro-nunciation. Similarly, interview data were supplemented by language autobi-ographies in Haddixs (2008) insightful study of two White, monolingual-Englishteacher candidates in a sociolinguistics course. L. Taylors (2006) short-termstudy of the experiences of a group of racially and ethnically diverse high schoolESL students in a Freirean-styled, antidiscrimination leadership camp (p. 520)also relied heavily on interview data, as did K. King and Ganuzas (2005) ethno-graphic investigation into the national, ethnic, and linguistic identifications of

Chilean-Swedish transmigrant youth, as manifested in interview talk.

Narrative/Life-History Research

It is no surprise that interviews were the central method of data generation inthe studies that were reviewed, which focused on participant life histories andnarratives (see, e.g., Andrews, Squire, & Tamboukou, 2008; Benwell & Stokoe,2006; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Gubrium & Holstein, 2008). Nor is it a surprisethat these studies investigated subject realities and life realities (Pavlenko,2007), nor, for that matter, that the kinds of analyses undertaken were as varied(and variable) as they were. Nevertheless, there was considerable methodolog-ical and analytic overlap between studies in this section and the previous one,particularly those ethnographic and case studies that foregrounded interviews.On the one hand, these overlaps are an artifact of the categories I have usedto organize this section, and the leakage (Trinh, 1989) between them. On theother, they may serve as evidence of some slippage in terms of how ethnogra-phy, case study, and narrative research have been conceptualized in appliedlinguistics: in fact, at times, the only way to discover whether a given studywas an ethnography, a case study, a narrative inquiry, life-history research, or aphenomenological study, was by the terminology used to identify it. Even then,these terms were at times used as if they were interchangeable (cf. Creswell,

1998; Hatch, 2002; Polkinghorne, 1995; Silverman, 2001).An exception is Menard-Warwicks (2005) life-history study of two Central

American women and their contrasting educational experiences following theirimmigration to the United States. Menard-Warwick used data from interviewsand classroom observations to represent the sociohistorically situated life tra-jectories (p. 171) of Brenda and Serafina as they attempted to balance English-language learning with family, work, scheduling difficulties, and U.S. immigra-tion policy. Tsuis (2007) narrative inquiry concerning a Chinese EFL (Englishas foreign language) learner and teachers negotiation of multiple conflictingidentities utilized a design more common to other narrative/life-history studies

reviewed, drawing on face-to-face interviews and diaries for Min-Fangs storiesabout struggling to identify with the professional identity of communicative


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language teacher. Gao (2008) included some welcome methodological detailconcerning her (thematic) data analysis, although her decision to employ life-history interviews to investigate 14 Chinese students language-learning strate-gies is curious, given the topical focus, and the number (two) and length

(45 minutes) of the interviews. Nonetheless, the study generally succeeded inits goal of capturing learners voices (p. 173), at least as those voices were rep-resented in the study. Participant voices were also well-represented in Carroll,Motha, and Price (2008), which analyzed narratives (written and spoken) fromtwo separate studies to examine how social structures and contexts can behavesimultaneously as powerfully tyrannizing regimes of truth and powerfully liber-ating imagined communities (p. 189). However, there is less detail than mightbe expected about the procedures of the content and thematic analyses thatwere undertaken, and little consideration of implications that the modalities ofthe narrative data might have had for the analysis. A point of contrast here can

be found in Cheungs (2005) study of teachers narratives about their careerdevelopment, which provided a remarkable amount of information about theinterviews and data analytic procedures that were undertaken.

Qualitative Interview Research

The studies considered in this section were identified by their authors simplyas qualitative or were not identified at all; despite substantive differences be-tween them, all used interviews as the primary method for generating empiricaldata. Palfreyman (2005), for example, relied almost exclusively on interviews inhis important study about processes of Othering (cf. Said, 1978) among Turk-ish teachers and expatriate administrators at a Turkish universitys English-language center. B. King (2008) provided a comparatively robust analytic frame-work based on Sacks (1972) to consider the pervasive but little-investigatedproblem of heteronormativity in L2 English education, using what appeared tobe a single group interview with three gay male Korean L2 learners for his data-set. In Baek and Damarin (2008), interviews were used to describe the complexinner stories (p. 195) of seven female L2-English-speaking university studentsfrom Korea and their experiences with computer-mediated communication inthe L2. Atay and Ece (2009) explore[d] the ideas (p. 21) and identity clash (p.31) of Turkish preservice teachers of English through a rich display of quotes

from their 34 participants, although it was unclear whose voices belonged towhom since quotes were not attributed to particular participants. In Sarkar andAllens (2007) qualitative study of identity and language use in a communityof multilingual, multiethnic hip-hop artists in Montreal, interviews focused onrappers use of mixed language and the links they perceive to their identitiesas Quebec hip-hoppers (p. 122). In a related study, Pennycook (2007) usedinterview data in his analysis of hip-hop in such countries as Malaysia, Korea,and Tanzania, and studied the challenges these localized varieties posed to theAfrican American hip-hop ideology of keepin it real. Varghese and Johnston(2007) indicated that the participants in their qualitative study of evangelical

Christian L2 English teachers were very articulate and very pleased to beinterviewed, and as a result, that the researchers had the impression that. . .


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the interviewees words could at one level. . .be taken as a reasonably accuraterecord of what they actually thought (p. 13). Interviews were also used in K.King and Fogles (2006) study of ways that parents discursively positioned them-selves to justify their bilingual parenting practices and policies, with parents

quotes about these matters organized around common themes that emergedfrom the data.

SUMMARY

As the review here suggests, qualitative research in applied linguistics that con-ceives of interviews as research instrument is remarkably diverse, in terms ofthe topics addressed, the theoretical frameworks adopted, the research meth-ods employed, and the ways that data and analyses are represented. Certainly,

these studies illustrate how common the interview as a methodological option inqualitative applied linguistics has become. As well, they underscore the utility,flexibility, and convenience of qualitative interviews for investigating an impres-sive array of matters of relevance to applied linguistics. At the same time, eachof these studies illustrates in different ways one or more of the features of thecommunicable cartography of interview as research instrument described ear-lier. I alluded earlier to several of these features; here I elaborate briefly on fourof them: the status of interview data as reports, the obfuscation of power, theinterview as giving voice to participants, and matters concerning data analysis.

Status of Data as Reports

There is an evident propensity in the research discussed earlier to conceptualizeinterview data as participant reports of objective or subjective reality, with agenerally exclusive focus on content, or the what of the interview. Perhapsthe clearest indication of the status ascribed to these data is in how they aredisplayed: frequently as decontextualized, stand-alone quotes of respondentsanswers, as if they were discrete speech events isolated from the stream ofsocial interaction in whichand for whichthey were produced (Wooffitt &Widdicombe, 2006, p. 39). Even when interviewers are included in represen-tations of data, there tends to be little analysis concerning their role in the

production of data. Both points are significant analytically, for, as a long line ofresearch in conversation analysis has demonstrated, answers are normativelyoriented to and designed for the questions that occasion them (Sacks, 1992;Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 2007). In other words, intervie-wees answers are shaped by, and oriented to, the interactional context. This[insight]. . . invites [researchers] to give serious consideration to the ways inwhich the interviewers participation is significantly implicated in what the re-spondents end up saying, and how they say it(Wooffitt & Widdicombe, 2006, p.56, my emphasis). This valuable analytic resource disappears, however, whendata are represented as direct reportsas if the interviewer were invisible

and consequently, a wide range of potentially important insights concerning thedata, analysis, and interpretations of a given study can be lost. For example,


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although Canagarajah (2008) provided important contextual information bymentioning differences in religion, caste, and class between his participants andhim, there was no analysis of the impact this may have had on his interviews.L. Taylor (2006), too, mentioned her own race (White), but did not consider

implications of this for her interviews or her findings, a curious omission giventhe studys focus on race, and that many interviewees were youth of Color.Although Menard-Warwick (2005) indicated that she made every effort to takeinto account [her] own presence as an Anglo, Spanish-speaking, former teacher(p. 170), she, too, was largely absent in her analysis of interview data. Similarly,in my (Talmy, 2006) ethnographic study concerning the struggles of a groupof Micronesian students at a Hawaii high school, I failed to consider my racedand placed (Blommaert, 2005) status as an adult White male researcher whosefirst language is English, interviewing ESL youth of Color. The same can be saidof Palfreyman (2005), who inexplicably did not consider his own identity as a

British expatriate in a study of Othering between expatriates and Turks at a Turk-ish university; and Varghese and Johnston (2007), who, although clear that asatheists their interpretations, findings, and conclusions will be colored by andfiltered through our subject positions (p. 13), were less informative concerningthe actual implications of this for their interviews with evangelical Christians. InGolombek and Jordan (2005), one of the researchers was the teacher of the twofocal students, and apparently, was one of the interviewers, too; yet nothing wasdiscussed about this relationship or its potential effect on the interviews. Thesame is true of Motha (2006), who was her focal participants course advisor,university teacher, and practicum coordinator; and Chavez (2007), who was herparticipants course supervisor, though she did briefly acknowledge (p. 185)that this relationship may have had some relevance for her findings. This is notto single out these studies as being unusual in any way; indeed, the neglect of therole of the researcher/interviewer in coconstructing interview datawhatevertheir relationship to the intervieweeis common across studies that conceiveof interviews as a research instrument.

Power

Relatedly, the interview is constituted by complex relations of power, which canbe differentially realized in many ways: who chooses whatand what notto

discuss; who asks what questions, when, and how; who is ratified to answerthem (and who is not); who determines when to terminate a line of questioning;and so on. There are also other potentially important asymmetries that may beless directly observable but equally relevant, if not more so, ranging from dif-ferences in institutional status, age, language expertise, social class, and more.Analyses that conceive of interviews as providing access to what participantsthink or believe, ascribe interview data the status of reports, or do not accountfor the complex pragmatics of interview practices (Briggs, 2007a, p. 555) ob-scure such power imbalances by simply not attending to them. Additionally,important power asymmetries can be enactedbeyondthe immediate interac-

tional context of the interview, in terms of data representation, specifically inwhat Bauman and Briggs (1990) have calledentextualization, the process of


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rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production[e.g., talk from an interview] into a unita textthat can be lifted out of itsinteractional setting (p. 73) so that it can berecontextualized, that is, placedinto another context. Thus, as Briggs (2007a) noted: power lies not just in con-

trolling how discourse unfolds in the context of its production but [in] gainingcontrol over itsrecontextualizationshaping how it draws on other discoursesand contexts and when, where, how, and by whom it will be subsequently used(p. 562). Just as interviews as research instrument do not address power withinthe interview itself, neither do they attend to power in terms of how thosedata are entextualized, decontextualized, and subsequently recontextualized,for example, as stand-alone quotes of what participants think.

Voice

A frequently cited rationale for adopting qualitative interview methods is thatthey allow participants own voices to be heard rather than obscured, forexample, in summaries, tables, or statistics; indeed, participant voices werecommunicated in resounding fashion in the studies reviewed earlier. However,such a conception of voice carries with it a range of assumptions that may gounexamined: for example, that a person speaks with a single voice; that voicedoes, or at least can, given the right circumstance, express ones true self; andthat the researcher or interviewer plays a central role in creating the liberatoryconditions for this voice to be heard, by establishing trust, asking the rightquestions, and not interrupting. All caveats concerning multiple, conflicting,and contradictory identities notwithstanding, such an unproblematized notionof voice suggests the existence of aunitary, coherent, andessentialself that theparticipant gives voice to. As Mazzei and Jackson (2009) sum up:

Qualitative researchers have recognized the dangerous assumptionsin trying to represent a single truth (seemingly articulated by a singlevoice) and have therefore pluralized voice, intending to highlight thepolyvocal and multiple nature of voice. . .. This practice of more isbetter has indeed highlighted the ways in which voices are not sin-gular, yet the obsession for more full voices side-steps . . . the prob-lem: these practices remain attached to notions of voice inherited from

metaphysicsvoice as present, stable, authentic, and self-reflective.Voice is still there to search for, retrieve, and liberate. (pp. 12)

Data Analysis

All of the studies reviewed earlier analyzed their interview data using somecombination of content and thematic analysis, an approach to analysis that iswell-aligned with a conceptualization of the interview as a research instrument(cf. Braun & Clarke, 2006).3 As one might expect for a collection of studies sodiverse, the type and quality of analyses were variable, ranging from sophisti-

cated thematic analyses, to general summaries of the content of what partici-pants said, to little or no provision of analytic comment at all. In her important


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by interviewer and interviewee. Rather than a concern with researcher bias,there is a fundamentally reflexive orientation to the collaborative character ofknowledge production and data generation. Rather than an exclusive focus oninterview content, or the what of the data, attention is directed both to the

what and how, that is, the contentandthe linguistic and/or interactionalresources used in coconstructing content and locally achieving the interviewas speech event. Taken together, these features constitute a communicable car-tography of the interview as participation in social practice(s)the (partially)routine activities through which people carry out (partially) shared goals basedon (partially) shared (conscious or unconscious) knowledge of the various rolesor positions people can fill [or do] in these activities (Gee, 2004, p. 33; also seeGiddens, 1984). A wide range of analytic approaches can be adopted for theanalysis of research interviews as social practice; among the most common arevarious types of (critical) discourse analysis (see, e.g., Blommaert, 2005; Eggins,

2005; Fairclough, 2003; Gee, 2005; Johnstone, 2008; Schiffrin, Tannen, & Hamilton,2001; cf. Wooffitt, 2005), narrative analysis (e.g., Andrews et al., 2008; Gubrium& Holstein, 2008), conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992) especially work in insti-tutional (Heritage, 2005) or applied (ten Have, 2007) conversation analysis(see especially Drew & Heritage, 1992), membership categorization analysis(Sacks, 1972, 1992; for work on interviews, see Baker, 2002, 2004), positioninganalysis (e.g., Bamberg, 2000; Harre & van Langenhove, 1992), and interactionalsociolinguistics (e.g., Gumperz, 1982), to name but a few. Depending on thedesign of a study and its scope, research questions, and theoretical frame-work, analytic focus can range from the comparatively micro (e.g., sequentialorganization, recipient design, discourse markers, contextualization cues, evi-dentiality, category-bound activities), to the macro (e.g., narrative structure,membership categorization devices, negotiation of identities, power relations,intertextuality, interdiscursivity), to more general orientations that engage lesswith the how than the what, but still challenge the conception of interviewsas a conduit into what people really think, know, or believe. In other words, topresume that analysis of interviews as social practicenecessarilyinvolves someform of micro-analysis, for example, would be as much a mistake as presumingthat it does not. Instead, the primary issue for a social practice analysis entailsan ontological and epistemologicalshift, by problematizing the ideologies thatconstitute the cartography of communicability that is referred to earlier as

interviews as research instrument.4

To demonstrate implications of this discussion, I consider in the remainderof this section several qualitative applied linguistics studies that conceive of theresearch interview as social practice. Each study uses interviews for a differentpurpose, and each analyzes the data generated from them using a differentapproach, ranging from micro-analysis to more general orientations that prob-lematize the status of the interview, the data, and the role of the interviewer.My aim in discussing these studies is not to hold them up as exemplars of anykind, but to provide some illustrative examples of this particular conception ofthe research interview.

Liebscher and Dailey-OCains (2009) qualitative study of language attitudesprovides a useful entry point for this discussion. In terms that parallel the


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different conceptualizations of the interview referred to above, Liebscher andDailey-OCain identified three different approaches taken in the analysis of qual-itative data on language attitudes, which are typically drawn from interviews:a content-based approach (pp. 197198), which aligns with the interview as

research instrument perspective; and two alternatives, turn-internal seman-tic and pragmatic approaches (pp. 198199) and interactional approaches(pp. 199201), which can be situated under the rubric of research interviewas social practice. The authors make a strong case for integrating these threelevels of analysis, drawing on interviews they conducted with western Ger-mans who had moved to Saxony and Germanemigres in Canada, concerningattitudes about the Saxon dialect. Using an analytic framework that combinedinteractional sociolinguistics, positioning analysis, and critical discourse anal-ysis, they showed not only that there was, for western Germans, a stigmaassociated with the Saxon dialect, but also how it was interactionally worked up

among focus group participants. The authors also demonstrated the compar-ative nonsalience of the stigma among Germanemigres in Canada, suggestingthat it was more important for these participants to index a common groundin the German language than to mark differences based on regional variation.As a result, the interviews themselves became central analytic sites, whereparticipants not only talked about language attitudes but alsoproducedthemwith one another and the researcher(s) in the interactions that constituted theinterviews.

Johnsons (2006) study of the construction and negotiation of teacher identityin a research interview uniquely foregrounds the interview as site for knowl-edge production. The study posed the following research question: Can apoststructural approach to critical reflection encourage teachers to becomemore critical? (p. 215). Rather than providing a thematic analysis based onthe teachers reports about her reflections on teaching, whether they werecritical or not, and if, as a result, she became more or less critical, Johnsoninvestigated how the identities of a good teacher and a good research par-ticipant became salient in her interviews. Drawing on conversation analysisand membership categorization analysis, she described in substantive detailthe ways that the teacher portrayed herself asdoingreflective practice from acritical perspective (p. 217, my emphasis), as well as how she oriented to beingan excellent interviewee, in the terms laid out by the researcher/interviewer

(p. 219). Consequently, the answer to her research question is based on a notablyreflexive analysis: that the interviewer primarily position[ed] the intervieweethrough the assignation of a teacher as excellent reflective practitioner cate-gory [with that] option. . .taken up by the teacher. . .in the ensuing [interview](p. 232).

Prior (in press) utilizes discursive psychology (e.g., Edwards & Potter, 1992,2005) and narrative analysis to examine two versions of the same emotion-ally charged narrative told on two separate occasions by Trang, a multilingual,multiethnic adult immigrant for whom English was an L2. From an interviewas research instrument perspective, such a study might be concerned with

issues related to reliability, for example, the degree of consonance betweenTrangs two tellings of a frustrating experience at a bank in Canada, whether


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they diverged and if so, in what ways, and so forth, with the similarities anddifferences pointing to how truthful Trang was, how dependable his mem-ory was, and whether his story was to be believed as a report of what re-ally happened. However, Prior located important differences between the two

narrative versions, characterizing them not as an indication of inconsistencybut as evidence that the tellings served substantially different rhetorical pur-poses in the different contextual circumstances of the two interviews (alsosee Pavlenko, 2007). The analysis is, once again, fundamentally reflexive, asit accounts not only for the content of the two versions of the bank narra-tive but also the interactional and interpersonal circumstances of their localproduction.

Campbell and Roberts (2007) continue a long line of work by Gumperz andassociates (e.g., Roberts, Davies, & Jupp, 1992) concerning interethnic com-munication in workplace encounters. The article examined the variable per-

formance of White and of Color British born applicants versus born abroadapplicants in job interviews, accounting for the comparatively unsuccessful per-formance of the latter group in terms of their failure to synthesize what theauthors calledpersonal and institutional discourses in the job interview. Theinterview data were subjected to a methodologically eclectic discourse anal-ysis, as the authors displayed differences in how both groups of applicantsnegotiated the interview, although it is not always clear what role the inter-viewer played in coconstructing successful and unsuccessful interview perfor-mances. However, one concern that stood out in the study, given the analysisof the job interview data, is what emerges as a central analytic inconsistency:the conceptualization of the status of a secondary stream of data used fromstimulated recall interviews. In contrast to the job interview data, the stimu-lated recall data were taken at face value, as accurate representations of whatparticipants were really thinking in the job interviews; that is, the stimulatedrecall interviews were treated as research instruments, in contrast to the jobinterviews. Unfortunately, the authors did not comment upon this apparenttension, leaving one to wonder whether it was a deliberate analytic move ornot.

Finally, Hawkins (2005) provides a good example of a study that engagesless with the how than the what of her interviews, but still problematizesthe ideologies that constitute the communicable cartography of interview as

research instrument (also see Block, 2000). This is likely due, at least in part, tothe fact that her interview participants were young children. Stating at onepoint that what was missing in her previous research on young childrensschool-based language and literacy development was their voices and opinions(p. 67), Hawkins and her research collaborator devised several ways of includ-ing them, one of which involved interviewing. The analysis of these data con-nects the contrasting patterns of communication and school engagement of twokindergarten boys: interactional patterns that were observed in classrooms areshown to be recontextualized and repeated in the interviews themselves. Theanalytic focus on how these boys participated in the interviews thus served as

an important secondary source of data for Hawkins larger argument about theirdiffering ways of participating in school.


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CONCLUSION

It may appear from the preceding discussion that I am advancing the positionthat qualitative applied linguists using interview methods should theorize them

as social practice. That is not the case. Studies that adopt (neo)positivist or nat-uralistic/romantic theoretical frameworks, for example, need not conceptualizeresearch interviews as social practice, though I believe there are clear advan-tages if they do. Rather, my goal is to call for greater attention to the theoriesof interview that allqualitative applied linguistics studies adopt, to highlightthe communicable cartography of interviewing that has been naturalized in theinterview society, and to raise questions about it so that the ideologies oflanguage, communication, and the interview that constitute it are not importedinto qualitative applied linguistics studies, at leastwithout due consideration.AsBriggs (2007a) argued, when interviews are not adequately theorized, and ide-

ologies of interviewing go unexamined, interviews largely remain black boxes. . . technologies so widely accepted that [researchers] can just feed in questionsand get quotations for [their] publications without worrying about the complexpragmatics that make them work. Our own assimilation of these ideologies [can]thus limit. . .the ways we interview and reflect on our own and other peoplesinterviews (p. 555). In this respect, I would suggest that there is consider-able need for heightened reflexivity about the interview methods that appliedlinguistics researchers use in their studies, on the role of the interviewer inoccasioning interview answers, on the subject behind the interviewee, on thestatus ascribed to interview data, and on how those data are analyzed and rep-resented, regardless of whether one opts to conceive of interviews as researchinstrument, or research interviews as participation in social practices.

NOTES

1 Due to space constraints, I do not consider in this article experimental studies thatincorporate qualitative interviews. There is a great deal that could (and should) besaid about this important stream of mixed methods research. However, although Imust side-step the discussion, I will state that these studies tend to adopt a theoryof interviewas research instrumentthat aligns well with the (e.g., [neo]positivist)theoretical frameworks of the larger studies in which the interviews are used. At thesame time, I do believe that quantitative researchers, like their qualitative colleagues,

would do well to work toward greater reflexivity concerning the ontological, episte-mological, and ideological assumptions guiding their decisions to use interviews, thestatus they ascribe to interview data, and the claims they make based on this particularresearch method.

2 Holstein & Gubrium (2003) elaborate:

When the interview is viewed as a dynamic, meaning making occasion . . .different criteria [regarding reliability and validity] apply. The focus is onhow meaning is constructed, the circumstances of construction, and themeaningful linkages that are assembled. . .. While interest in the content ofanswers persists, it is primarily in how and what the subject/respondent, incollaboration with an equally active interviewer, produces and conveys about

the subject/respondents experience under the interpretive circumstances athand. One cannot expect answers on one occasion to replicate those on


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another because they emerge from difference circumstances of production.Similarly, the validity of answers derives not from their correspondence tomeanings held within the respondent, but from their ability to convey situatedexperiential realities in terms that are locally comprehensible. (p. 71)

3 However, it was indicated in several studies that some form of discourse analysishad in fact been undertaken. For example, Haddix (2008, p. 261) and Miller (2007,p. 152) stated that they used Gees approach for analysis; Golombek & Jordan(2005, p. 519) mentioned Fairclough; while L. Taylor (2006, p. 526) referred gener-ically to discourse analysis. K. King & Ganuza (2005) mentioned Prestons (1994)content-oriented discourse analysis, but it is not clear what this involved, how itwas done, or what analytic benefit it provided. Hayes (2005) provided a sophisticatedtheoretical discussion about the role of the researcher in coconstructing interviewdata, but did not, unfortunately, apply these insights to his analysis. B. King (2008) at-tempted to use Sacks (1972) membership categorization analysis, but was ultimatelyunsuccessful in his attempt at following through. Only Varghese & Johnston (2007)actually delivered on a Bakhtinian analysis, although it is minimal enough that it is

ultimately subordinated to the content analysis featured in the study. See Antaki,Billig, Edwards, & Potter (2003); Burman (2004); and S. Taylor (2001) for more oncriteria that can be used to determine what constitutes a discourse analysis.

4 An excellent discussion and useful set of guidelines for undertaking an analysis ofqualitative applied linguistics interviews as social practice can be found in Richards(2003, pp. 79103).

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AUTHOR NOTE

My thanks to Keith Richards, Charlene Polio, and the anonymous reviewersfor comments on earlier drafts of this article, and to Gabi Kasper, who severalyears ago introduced me to many of these ideas. All errors in the article are myresponsibility.

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