ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA 117“Accessing data,” then, is shorthand for a wide variety of methods used in generating the data
that form the basis for what one analyzes, commonly, with other sorts of methods. Some of the
activities that comprise this accessing-and-generating stage may precede negotiating physical
access; in some fields, these are rarely included in methods discussions. For example, for certain
research projects, the researcher needs to identify the sorts of documents—whether historic or
contemporary, legislative or organizational, public or proprietary—that might yield information
that might be relevant to the topic under investigation. Sometimes this can mean identifying and/
or locating archives, private libraries, newspaper morgues, or other repositories. For other sorts of
studies or other phases of the same study, “identifying and locating” may refer to the individuals
one thinks might know something about one’s subject that might be useful to one’s analysis.
Other studies or phases require similar thinking through of potential settings—“field sites”—that
might yield interesting observational data.
The doubled potentiality—will this person, document, or setting be relevant to my study, and
if I manage to negotiate access, will what I learn inform my research?—marks this exploratory
phase of accessing data. It is an exploration done before efforts to gain actual access can be
initiated, with one major class of exceptions. In interpretive research, one source—whether hu-
man, documentary, or setting—may, and often does, lead to another; in fact, one typical question
closing an interview is, “With whom else should I speak?” And so this identification-and-access
process is carried out continually, as contingency is not only anticipated but built into the research
design. For this reason, detailing a research plan in advance of carrying out the research has
limited utility and efficacy, and often is just not possible or desirable. This is especially the case
when research is done in places not well known in advance, especially those at a significant
distance such that it is difficult or even impossible to make one or more preliminary scouting
trips. Information passed on by predecessors at one’s research site may be outdated. And al-
though the internet has made many more sources of information available in advance, its tools
and capabilities are not unlimited.
The discussions in these chapters of methods of accessing and generating data begin after
these initial determinations of potentiality have been made and after permissions, where neces-
sary, have been secured. What are being accessed are less the data themselves than potential
sources of potential evidentiary data. In engaging these data sources through talking to people,
observing and/or interacting with them, and/or reading about them and/or their activities, evi-
dence is being generated—collaboratively, in the case of interviews and interactions—that the
researcher will analyze and then marshal to make an argument.
TALKING
Interview as a subset of talk, as Chapman put it, denotes a range of talk modes. Various methods
textbooks even use the term in reference to “administering” questionnaires. The kind of inter-
viewing interpretive researchers draw on most widely does not follow, in lock-step fashion, a
prepared list, survey style, of dozens of questions, and especially not those that can be answered
with a single word or checked box. It is a talk mode sometimes referred to as “in-depth” or “open-
ended” interviewing.
“Conversation” comes close to capturing the character of interviewing in an interpretive mode.
It is an ordinary term—in reporting on one’s daily activities, one is more likely to talk about
having a conversation than about talking in depth or open endedly. We may well sacrifice the
rhetorical power of technical terminology in talking about “conversational interviewing.” But
these are discursive conversations, not interrogations. Many of them do take place in kitchens