TALKING OUR WAY TO MEANINGFUL EXPLANATIONS 127127CHAPTER 6
TALKING OUR WAY TO
MEANINGFUL EXPLANATIONS
A Practice-Centered View of Interviewing for Interpretive Research
JOE SOSS
I’m not sure if I snuck up on this project or if it snuck up on me. I’m fairly certain, though, that
some kind of sneakiness was involved: There was no sign of it from a distance. Looking back now,
I see a string of conversations and decisions that accumulated piecemeal and in unexpected ways.
I also see remnants of plans I thought I had abandoned—ideas that I had once seized upon as
dissertation topics; worked out with feverish excitement; presented to my friends as neatly wrapped,
rational research designs; and then discarded as worthless. These failed efforts turned out to have
worth after all. Many generated ideas that later cropped up as key elements of the project I
describe in this chapter.
The seeds of the study were planted in a late-night conversation on the floor of my Madison
apartment. I was preparing for a comprehensive exam, and a friend came over to help me get a
better handle on “political participation” as a subfield of American political science. By chance,
I had just finished reading Donileen Loseke’s work on the social construction of domestic vio-
lence at women’s shelters and had also just come across Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat’s classic
paper on “naming, blaming, and claiming” in the emergence of legal disputes. At the time, nei-
ther seemed especially relevant for my work. But they were full of exciting ideas, and I couldn’t
stop thinking about them. The more my friend and I talked, the more these ideas crowded in and
pushed toward two themes. First, perhaps students of political participation needed to pay more
attention to the “everyday” claims people make on governments as they try to solve important
problems in their own lives. And second, perhaps explanations of political participation should
pay more attention to the ways people classify self and circumstance, and how such classifica-
tions may suggest or obscure the possibility of seeking government action. I made up my mind to
study marital violence—to investigate the processes by which people become willing to classify
themselves as “victims,” spouses as “abusers,” and circumstances as ones that justify claims on
publicly funded shelters, local social services, and judicial institutions.
Then I promptly forgot all about it. Over the next two years, I cycled through lots of unrelated
dissertation ideas and began to develop a new interest in welfare politics. I had no plans to
pursue this topic in my dissertation until I read a series of feminist writings that identified welfare
claiming as an important form of political action by poor women. Suddenly, the conversation on
my apartment floor came back to me, and I began to wonder: how do people name their circum-
stances in a way that suggests it is okay, even sensible, to take on the stigmatized identity of