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Dancing Lessons from God
journeyed cautiously into areas of discontent and disillusion, and fi-
nally asked why she quit her job. I was being the good ethnographer
as described by Spradley in The Ethnographic Interview ( 1979 ) and
by Gordon in Basic Interviewing Skills ( 1992 ). I was so happy. It was
a great interview. The facts collected eventually informed several pub-
lications related to work communities, female employment, and de-
partment store organizational culture (Creighton 1989 , 1990 , 1993 ,
1995 a, 1995 b, 1997 a).
The interview lasted about an hour, the intended time length, and
it was just right. I then did what the good ethnographer is supposed
to do in exiting from the interview. One provides a transition from
the interview back to usual forms of social exchange. In other words,
typical textbook advice on interviewing suggests that one starts with
lighter, social conversation before getting into the core business of the
interview. Likewise, one does not just bluntly leave the informant af-
ter the facts have been drained from his or her mind like blood from
his or her body. One exhibits a real or feigned interest in the person.
One provides a transition back to usual forms of social communica-
tion and exchange by transitional conversation often unrelated to (or
less related to) the specific purposes of the interview. One then com-
pletely ends the interview and leaves one’s informant. Since the way I
knew her socially was through the Korean language class, I got ready
to put my notebooks away and said to her, transitionally, “So how did
you happen to get interested in taking the Korean class?”
In making this inquiring comment, I was doing just what I had done
socially at the coffee shop outings we both had gone to. I was do-
ing what one is supposed to do. We ought to have been going home
happy, with a sense that a cycle of engagement had been fulfilled, in-
cluding, transitional entry into the interview, core of the interview,
and transitional exit out of the interview back to usual concerns and
interests. With a sense of closure, the ethnographic task is normally
completed. However, something happened. Being the good ethnog-
rapher is one thing. Being the good informant, I learned, is another.
The informant had apparently neither read the methods texts nor the
books on how interviews should go. She did not then act as a good in-
formant should. On the contrary, when I made the exiting interview
