118 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
and living rooms, in community centers and in well-baby clinics, on shop floors and outside
corner grocery stores—and not only in offices and other, more formal settings. They are as likely
to be chatty exchanges—“informal” interviews—started up by the office water cooler or in the
neighborhood watering hole (whether the café or the pub) as set up on the calendar in advance
(“formal” interviews).^2 And they can be as much “small talk” as “big” talk—and may, at times,
combine both.
The more discursive format has led to such interviews being called “open ended.” That termi-
nology positions the concept in opposition to survey questionnaires, whose items are “closed
ended.” But this linguistic opposition has itself led to a perceptual and conceptual opposition that
is problematic—a view that unlike the more structured and rigid procedures of survey research,
open-ended interviewing rambles all over the place, with no structure and no direction on the part
of the interviewer. In fact, the opposite is far more likely to obtain. Whereas we might construct
a continuum of interview genres from more directed to less directed, in interpretive interviewing
the researcher does direct the conversation in one way or another, toward some focus or purpose
relative to the research question. For that reason, interviewing in an interpretive mode has also
been called “purposive conversation.”
“In depth” is another term for interviewing in a conversational or discursive mode. It, too,
developed to distinguish such methods from survey questionnaires, which are often characterized
as being more “superficial” in the extent to which they delve into their subjects’ lives. True,
interpretive interviewing is intended to explore the meaning(s) of terms and/or situations and/or
events and so on to the persons who live with and/or lived through them. One might conceive of
experience-based meaning as “deeper” in some way than attitudes or single-sentence opinions.
But “in-depth” interviewing seems to grasp as little of the character of such methods as “open-
ended” interviewing, both terms having been developed to contrast their practices with surveys
more than to capture the style of this mode of interaction itself.
Joe Soss’s chapter 6 masterfully reviews some of the nuances in the relationship between
interviewer and respondent and the strengths of the conversational approach. The unique context
of a conversational interview—an exchange with a focused listener who is eager to devote the
time to hear the respondent’s views—allows the respondent to reflect on and even explore her
own ideas, to reveal not only strong views but also worries, uncertainties—in a word, to engage
human vulnerability. So often, everyday human interactions are marked by habitual, unreflective
modes of communicating. Conversational interviewing, by contrast, can be a way to lay bare, as
Soss argues, human agency—those points at which human beings go along with others’ expecta-
tions of them and those points at which they resist and, instead, chart an autonomous path.
Soss also analyzes how recognizing others’ humanity and agency means coping with the emo-
tional connections and disconnections that arise in this intimate setting. Reflexivity on the
researcher’s part is essential—reading one’s own sympathy or repugnance, knowing when to
push an issue forward or when to back off, and analyzing how these emotions and decisions affect
the data co-generated in these exchanges. Social, occupational, and political life is filled with
emotional content—anger, humiliation, empathy, fear—that can be key to understanding indi-
vidual and collective, organizational, communal, political, and other action. Conversational in-
terviews can enable the exploration of how people make sense of their emotional experiences and
how this sense making connects to action.
The discursive character of interviewing in an interpretive mode is clear in the brief transcript
reported by Frederic Schaffer in chapter 7. Despite the fact that the interviewer has been trained
in very specific techniques, absent Schaffer’s descriptive phrases labeling the kind of questions
being asked, the interchange resembles nothing more than a conversation between two persons,