The interview as metacommunication event

Or, why interviews are not doing what you think

Interviews are weird things. My colleague Paul Prior, in discussing interviews and other qualitative methods in his book Writing/Disciplinarity (1998), wonders “how inadequate references to conventional research tools (e.g., semi-structured interview, discourse-based interview, intertextual analysis, process tracing) may be” (p. 306). What do we mean when we say interview? Why are we turning to interviews? Charles Brigg’s canonical Learning how to ask (1986) addresses these questions by thinking about what exactly an interview does. Briggs writes: “The validity of a great deal of what we believe to be true about human beings and the way they relate to one another hinges on the viability of the interview as a methodological strategy” (p. 1). Briggs then goes on to level, in my opinion, three devastating critiques toward the interview a method. These critiques are full quotations.

First critique

Interviews provide examples of metacommunication, statements that report, describe, interpret, and evaluate communicative acts and processes. All speech communities possess repertoires of metacommunicative events that they use in generating shared understandings with respect to themselves and their experiences. As I argue in Chapter 4, these native metacommunicative events are rich in the pragmatic features that root speech events in a particular social situation and imbue them with force and meaning. Unfortunately, researchers seldom gain competence (in Hymes's [1974a:92-97] sense of the term) in these repertoires, relying instead on the metacommunicative routine that figures so prominently in their own speech community - the interview. This practice deprives the researcher of an adequate sense as to how the information she or he obtains fits into broader patterns of thinking, feeling, and speaking (p. 2)

Second critique

An even more serious problem is inherent in the structure of the interview. By participating in an interview, both parties are implicitly agreeing to abide by certain communicative norms. The interview moves the roles that each normally occupies in life into the background and structures the encounter with respect to the roles of interviewer and interviewee. Attention is concentrated on the topics introduced by the researcher's questions. Preliminary "small talk" may highlight the participants' present states of mind and body ("How are you?") and their relationship ("It's good to see you. I appreciate your letting me interview you again"). But the initial question then shifts the focus away from the interaction to another time, place, or process ("Now tell me about . . ."). (p. 2-3)

Third critique

A third difficulty arises because suppression of the norms that guide other types of communicative events is not always complete. Some potential respondents are drawn from communities whose sociolinguistic norms stand in opposition to those embedded in the interview. This is likely to be the case in groups that do not feature the interview as an established speech-event type. Lacking experience in this means of relating, such individuals are less likely to be able and willing to adhere to its rules. The farther we move away from home, culturally and linguistically, the greater the problem. This hiatus between the communicative norms of interviewer and researcher can greatly hinder research, and the problems it engenders have sometimes abruptly terminated the investigation. If the fieldworker does not take this gap into account, he or she will fail to see how native communicative patterns have shaped responses; this will lead the researcher to misconstrue their meaning. (p. 3)

To be clear, Briggs’ work is a product of its time, space, and content. Written in the 1980s, it was meant to spurn ethnographers and fieldworkers to think carefully about the gap between them and their participants, critique what could be learned through the act of an interview (as opposed to observation and groundwork). Briggs turns the target on himself, valiantly in my opinion, by examining mistakes (“blunders”) he made in his own work with Spanish speakers in New Mexico. It’s a superb book and you should read it. Briggs sees the interview, as a method, as being used in research for things it doesn’t really do.

Let me elaborate here. The interview is a site of knowledge production, not a reflection of prior knowledge. This latter view is what most people take it to be. The reason for this: interviews are metacommunication events that are co-produced by the interviewee and interviewer. Whatever the interviewee answers is directly related to what the interviewer asks. In my current work, for example, I asked about “communication issues” interviewees had when “communicating about machine learning.” My participants took “issues” to mean problems. Most of them had issues, I can report, not only because they actually experienced issues, but also because I asked them to report those issues. As an interviewer, I actualized issues into existence. I asked several follow ups during the interviews but the interview was the site of the creation of these problems. The answers I received were thus routinized. It was, in fact, only through interviewing that these issues could be routinized for participants because they likely never took notes on communication issues. To understand the answers as routines, produced by the interviews, is a different epistemological treatment of the interview as a site of knowledge production rather than a reflection of some reference that I would treat as ground truth.

What then is the interview, as a method, doing? At least four things.

First, it’s a participatory creation of the interviewer. The practical takeaway here is that very minor shifts in interviewing questions (word choice, form, timing) are of consequence. Interviewers should plan out their questions and practice them—even hedges.

Second, the interview is an open well or mine of referentiality (whatever figurative language you prefer). There are many opportunities for miscommunication and areas for learning. Interviewers need to be prepared for the latter, as well as the former. It’s for this reason that interviews should always have an open-ended section or, if structured interviews are being performed, a follow-up should be scheduled.

Third, knowledge generated from interviews are dependent on the interviewer’s positionality, which is not clear until this positionality is altered in some way. The power rests in the interviewer, who directs the interviewee. To challenge some of this, researchers may change who the interviewer is to identify if patterns remain or change after the interviewer is changed (think here of various intersectional identities and how the knowledge exchange—not recall—is dependent on the interviewer).

Finally, an interview shows gaps where other types of methods are necessary. Perhaps it’s observation, surveys, statistical analyses, or whatnot. But interviews are never enough.

References

Briggs, C. L. (1986). Learning how to ask: A sociolinguistic appraisal of the role of the interview in social science research.

Prior, P. (1998). Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. Routledge.