MAKING SENSE OF THE OTHER: THE EVOLUTION OF THE INTERVIEW METHOD IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Patricia Fernández-Kelly Princeton University Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research November 2004 Draft of a paper first presented at the conference on The Use of Interviews in Writing the History of Recent Science. Stanford University Program in the History of Science. Please do not quote or cite without the written permission of the author.Introduction Is an interview more than a magnified conversation? Can the dialogue between two strangers spew the raw material of which science is made? There are at least two ways to address these questions. The first one encompasses a recapitulation of the procedures by which social scientists—anthropologists and sociologists in particular—have obtained information from a selected number of individuals or subjects as part of the study of larger populations. In that case, the task is mostly descriptive entailing a summary of techniques and interpretations. The second, more difficult endeavor, includes a series of considerations about the evolving relationship between professional observers and those observed as part of a contested process to pinpoint meanings, establish cognitive boundaries, and develop internally plausible narratives. In this respect, any assessment of the interview method requires a critique of the pathways that lead to knowledge. In this paper I first provide a synthesis of changes in approach affecting the interview method since the early twentieth century as a preamble for a discussion of substantive issues. Of a multitude of related concerns, I broach only two: one is the allegation that the interview method contradicts objectivity, therefore violating the fundamental precondition of scientific research. Another is the claim that interviewing yields only idiosyncratic or anecdotal information of trivial interest to the understanding of larger populations. Throughout the paper I maintain that interviews are a pivotal aspect of systematic research and thus indivisible from a broader methodological approach that includes participant observation, fieldwork, and the elaboration of ethnographic narratives. For that reason, the contentions surrounding the interview method extend to qualitative research as a whole. Although a time-honored tradition in the social sciences, qualitative methodologies lost some recognition in the wake of procedures that centered on the large-scale manipulation of quantifiable data made possible by computer technology. Nevertheless, I maintain that qualitative and quantitative research strategies are not mutually exclusive. Quantifiable data, especially whenderived from randomly selected samples, are most appropriate when the purpose of research is to generalize findings to larger populations. Those data, however, conceal processes occurring at the micro-level. The strength of qualitative methods lies in the ability to explore meanings and sequences of interrelated events that may not be evident at the aggregate level, and to raise questions that can be pursued subsequently by quantitative research. To paraphrase Michael H. Agar, quantitative strategies can be used to discern the extent to which a phenomenon occurs in a larger universe; qualitative research is most appropriate to elucidate what the phenomenon means or, in fact, whether it exists at all. The purpose of qualitative research is not to generalize but to create internally plausible explanations about specific areas of experience.1 I give some attention to the use of life narratives as texts that express people's understanding of their own circumstances.2 Case histories and personal narratives require that we view the statements of informants as constructions emerging from singular social, economic and political experiences. Such constructions give voice to subjects in their own terms, allowing them to reflect upon personal and collective culture. Whether meaning is of any interest for the development of theory and policy is a question to which I return in the third section of this paper. At this time, I merely note my agreement with John Van Maanen's retelling of Clifford Geertz’s proposition: It is not enough to observe how social actors behave but also necessary to understand what they think 1 Agar, Michael H. 1986. Speaking of Ethnography. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications. 2 See Leiter, Kenneth. 1980. A Primer on Ethnomethodology. New York: Oxford University Press; Van Maanen, John (editor). 1983. Qualitative Methodology. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications; Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press; Miles, Matthew B. and A. Michael Huberman. 1984. Qualitative Data Analysis. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications; McCracken, Grant. 1988. The Long Interview. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications; Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Denzin, Norman K. 1989. Interpretive Biography. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications; Gladwin, Christina H. 1989. Ethnographic Decision Tree Modeling. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications; Marshall, Catherine and Gretchen B. Rossman. 1989. Designing Qualitative Research. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications.they are doing.3 Anthropological Research and the Interview Method The history of anthropology has been marked by two major shifts since the middle half of the 19th Century. The first one, coterminous with the emergence of anthropology as a demarcated discipline, entailed a move away from panhuman questions, evolutionary theory and race. That trend culminated with the work of Franz Boas in the early 1900s, who abandoned grand theory in favor of historical particularism, that is, the painstaking description of cultural details and material artifacts. A second, more elusive, shift entailed a gradual obliteration of the line dividing observers from the observed and the conceptualization of knowledge as the product of structured inter-subjective exchanges. Below, I pause to examine in more detail the two shifts and their relationship to the interview method. The modern roots of anthropology are found in the period of Great Discoveries that brought to inquisitive Europeans both accurate and distorted reports about previously
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