ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA 119one of whom is most interested in what the other has to say about the subject of demokaraasi/
demokrasya. In another context, one might imagine having a similar conversation with one’s immi-
grant grandmother about her experiences: The curiosity to know is what drives the conversation.
Such conversations are structured, although the structure varies according to the subject and
the setting. For some research questions, a chronological structure is most appropriate (in what
order did events unfold?). For others, it might be a spatial structure (e.g., what was going on next
door as x was happening?), possibly organized horizontally (right to left, or left to right, depend-
ing on the culture and/or the question or event), possibly vertically (top to bottom, or vice versa).
Time and space are not the only organizing principles for conversational interviews, although
they are common ones. An agency-related interview might be structured along organizational
lines (authority, hierarchy, power). Gender might be another structuring principle, the demo-
graphic or organizational “mapping” of neighborhoods, another.
Schaffer’s identification of kinds of questions takes a major step toward detailing what, ex-
actly, goes on in a “client-centered” interview (of the sort developed by Carl Rogers [1951], in a
therapeutic context) or in the so-called active listening that derives from it. There are myriad
ways in which an interviewer paraphrases what she has just been told, both to signal that she
really has been listening, thereby further developing rapport with the person being interviewed,
and to communicate, sincerely, what she has understood. Schaffer shows some of the forms such
paraphrasing can take. His note 4 is tremendously important on this score: By conveying to our
interlocutor what it is that we just understood of what we were told, we check on our interpreta-
tions. This is the attitude of testability (or “revisability”), that hallmark of doing science or being
scientific, enacted in a very concrete way, as it opens the door to the possibility of learning that
we did, in fact, “get it wrong”—we made our own sense, but it was not the sense of the person
talking, and that, after all, is what we were after.
Schaffer underscores the importance of context, specifically in the ways that language and act
are mutually implicating in the process of learning to make sense of any symbol system. His
quote from Wittgenstein on games highlights the difference between coming to a study with
concepts and theories already in place versus avoiding the rush to diagnosis and waiting to see
whether patterns emerge out of one’s immersion in what one is told. This line of thinking posi-
tions the researcher methodologically in the language debates of philosophy and linguistics and
their applications (e.g., in legal studies): It is a Wittgensteinian position to claim that meaning
resides not in the words themselves but in their usage—a position that characterizes interpretive
methodologies more broadly, given their focus on context specificity (see, e.g., Valverde 2003).
We want to emphasize that ordinary language interviewing may be used within one’s own
national or other culture, too. As scholars of organizational culture have noted over the last twenty-
five years and more (e.g., Smircich 1983; Ingersoll and Adams 1992), agencies and their divi-
sions or departments establish their own cultures, and language usage is one way in which they
demarcate these boundaries. Researchers coming to study organizations within their own national,
regional, or other cultures may be as much foreigners to them and their language particularities as
Schaffer was studying Senegalese demokaraasi in Woloff. Whatever the setting, interpretive re-
searchers begin not with predefined concepts, but with curiosity to discover how local practices
inform local vocabularies—what “native” terms and concepts mean in local usages.
We note that Schaffer’s interview is a wonderful example of the claim that interpretive meth-
ods are more democratic, in the sense that they acknowledge the interlocutor’s expertise in his
own situation and the legitimacy of his own local knowledge. The interviewer is respectful of
Juan de la Cruz and of Juan’s local knowledge of his own experience, his own views, his own
language; the interviewer treats Juan as expert on these—which, of course, he is. Conversational