Abstract
The paper outlines different modes of inference that researchers are able to make from interview data. Rather than championing one correct mode of inference, I argue that most open-ended and semi-structured interviews contain (a) open contexts in which we can cautiously infer about other situations from the interview; (b) contexts that we should treat as hermetically closed; and (c) refracted contexts in which the relationship between the interview and other situations is patterned but not direct. Having outlined these contexts, the paper focuses on two forms of refracted relations between interviews and other contexts of action, analyzing interviews as refracted images of both people’s landscapes of meaning and talk’s promissory aspect. In doing so, the article makes two contributions. First, it seeks to clarify how researchers should think about the inferences they can make from in-depth interviews. Second, it is also meant as a contribution to our understanding of the relationship among situations by stressing how actors’ talk sets up collective action in ways that often end up supporting the projects they narrate.
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Notes
As an illustration, the combined number of methodology-centered interview articles ever published in Sociological Methodology and Sociological Methods & Research—the two main “generalist” methods journals in the United States—is 36. Almost all these articles are focused on various interviewer effects in survey-interview contexts, where questions of inference are crucial and well-studied. Qualitative Sociology, which features a large amount of interview research, has only ever published 13 articles focusing on interviewing as method. In other journals, the pickings are even slimmer. An interesting exception is the European journal Qualitative Research, which devotes more attention to interviews, although it too gives more room to ethnographic methodology.
I note, however, that such protagonist-driven and agentic discourse is not only shaped by the interview-situation. This way of telling stories about ourselves is a widely-available and constraining cultural trope (see, e.g., O’Brien 2015).
Focusing on process, such interviews often also use various forms of elicitation or “props” to ground the processual accounts—e.g., showing a work product to ask about the stages of its production (Kameo 2015).
Another example is cognitive neuroscientists’ attempt to elicit aspects of moral life through experiments in which they posit various “trolley problems” that have little to do with actual situations of moral deliberation and action (see Abend 2011). These experiments, however, are only superficially similar to interview contexts.
Such context can be elicited either through triangulation via other forms of research (see Rinaldo and Guhin 2019) or—more commonly—through reliance on secondary materials. However, even with such triangulation, we cannot assume that the landscapes that interviewees construct in interviews are identical to those that they construct in other situations. Rather, researchers can assume enough of a family resemblance to use the patterns that they observe as methodological anchoring devices.
See Winchester and Green (2019) for an insightful account of how narratives shape possibilities for action over time.
A hint that there are such causal pathways between interviews and situated action can be found in Vaisey’s (2014, 229) comment that “it is also vital to ask how attitudes, beliefs, or dispositions influence behavior across contexts and selection into contexts.”
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Paul DiMaggio, Kathleen Gerson, Jeff Guhin, Colin Jerolmack, Claire Sieffert, and Stefan Timmermans for thoughtful comments on previous drafts. I also thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Qualitative Sociology for pushing me to clarify my thoughts and writing.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. The research for this paper was not supported by any external funding.
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Tavory, I. Interviews and Inference: Making Sense of Interview Data in Qualitative Research. Qual Sociol 43, 449–465 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-020-09464-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-020-09464-x