30.4437, Review: Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Roulston (2019)

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Subject: 30.4437, Review: Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Roulston (2019)

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Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 13:09:43
From: Zhi Huang [jeffzhihuang at gmail.com]
Subject: Interactional Studies of Qualitative Research Interviews

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-2014.html

EDITOR: Kathryn  Roulston
TITLE: Interactional Studies of Qualitative Research Interviews
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Zhi Huang, Macquarie University

SUMMARY

“Interactional Studies of Qualitative Research Interviews”, edited by Kathryn
Roulston, began as a panel discussion at the International Pragmatics Research
Association meeting in Antwerp, Belgium in 2015. This book presents a
selection of interactional studies of qualitative research interviews from
researchers in the US, UK, South Korea, Italy and Portugal. There are four
parts in this book: Part I is an introduction, giving an overview of the
social practices of interviewing; Part II explores the interactional details
of Interviewer-interviewee Identities and Knowledge Production in Research
Interviews and has five main chapters; Part III explores conversational
resources and social actions produced in interviews and has five main
chapters; Part IV is the conclusion of this book, discussing the way(s) of
interviewing and exploring social studies of interviews. This book offers a
look at what else goes on in interviews in addition to providing a window into
participants’ worlds, which means, according to Harold Garfinkel (1967, 36),
the “’seen-but-unnoticed’, expected, background features” of interaction in
which speakers negotiate the research interview as one form of institutional
talk. This book addresses the question: What are the processes by which
speakers construct the local order of interviews? The book is intended for
those who are interested in qualitative research interviews, or those pursuing
qualitative studies that use interviews.

Part I: Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction: Examining the Social Practices of Interviewing
(Kathryn Roulston)

This chapter introduces the whole book by reviewing work that uses
ethnomethodologically inspired approaches to analyze research interviews.
Informed by critiques that much interview research fails to account for
interactional contexts in which descriptions were generated, this work uses
tools drawn from ethnomethodology (EM), membership categorization analysis
(MCA) and conversation analysis (CA) to explore features of interview
interaction, construction of speakers’ accounts, interviewers’ roles in the
generation of data, and what this means for social research. The main result
of this chapter informs the design and conduct of research studies, the
analysis and representation of interview data, and the teaching of interview
practice. It also introduces the organization of the whole book.

Part II: Exploring the Interactional Details of Interviewer-interviewee
Identities and Knowledge Production in Research Interviews

Chapter 2: “Like Us You Mean?”: Sensitive Disability Questions and Peer
Research Encounters (Valerie Williams)

This chapter examines excerpts from three research studies to examine how
parties to interaction oriented to questions about impairment, and how the
identity work of interviewers and interviewees might make a difference. The
main contribution of this chapter is the exploration of what happens when
interviewers share commonality with interviewees with disabilities. In the
conclusion, the author proposes a way to think about the kinds of tasks that
interviewees must accomplish in order to respond to sensitive questions. The
recommendations in this chapter have profound implications for how researchers
might think about research collaborations, the interview set-up and
corresponding interactional rights that ensue in asking and answering
interview questions.

Chapter 3: Research Interviewers as ‘Knowers’ and ‘Unknowers’ (Kathryn
Roulston)

This chapter draws on Heritage’s (2013) work on epistemics in conversation to
explore how interviewers elicit knowledge claims from research participants
during interviews. Research interviewers must navigate the spectrum of
potential relationships with interviewees from insider to a culture from which
interviewees are drawn, to outsider. This chapter examines excerpts from
interviews to explore how parties to interaction hold one another accountable
for rights and responsibilities to do with epistemic access, primacy and
responsibility to know about particular topics in research interviews. It also
shows the value of understanding the concept of recipient design (Heritage,
2018) for conducting interviews.

Chapter 4: On Doing ‘Being Feminist’ and ‘Being Researcher’: Lessons from a
Novice Interviewer (Brigette Adair Herron)

In this chapter, Brigette Adair Herron uses the tools of EM and MCA and
re-examines what she initially took to be a “failed interview” that she
conducted as a novice researcher. She examines the construction of interview
data with a stranger in another country in which both speakers collaboratively
produce “feminist” and “researcher” identities. Herron outlines how the
lessons that she learned from re-examining this interview might be applied to
the preparation of novice interviewers, with particular attention given to
promoting ethical research practices.

Chapter 5: “What does It Mean?”: Methodological Strategies for Interviewing
Children (Rebecca Ann Smith)

This chapter methodically examines the strategies that Smith had drawn from
literature on doing research with children and used in her study. Smith uses
the tools of conversation analysis to examine what happened when she used
these strategies to work with third-graders in an ethnographic study. This
chapter contributes understandings as to how she navigated the child/adult
binary within her study, how children’s language might be examined, and what
happened as she worked with young children who were inexperienced with
interviewing.

Chapter 6: Epistemic Shifts: Examining Interviewer and Self-praise in
Interviews (Stephanie Anne Shelton)

In this chapter, Stephanie Anne Shelton re-examines interview data with an
early career teacher with whom she worked over the course of a four-year
study. Using the tools of conversation analysis, Shelton shows that in
response to her actions as an interviewer, Bailey begins to replace
advice-seeking sequences with sequences of self-praise. This chapter shows how
analysis of interviews conducted over a lengthy period of time can reveal how
speakers’ epistemic access with respect to research topics may change, and in
turn, the conversational actions that take place in interviews undergoes
transformation.

Part III: Exploring Conversational Resources and Social Actions Produced in
Interviews

Chapter 7: “That’s a Stupid Question!”: Competing Perspectives and Language
Choice in an English-Japanese Bilingual Research Interview (Amy Snyder Ohta
and Matthew T. Prior)

This chapter examines excerpts from a bilingual research interview to examine
what gets said when speakers select to speak in different languages, English
and Japanese. The analysis shows how language speakers use multilingual
resources to very different effects. In addition to highlighting the
unpredictable, contingent and indeterminant nature of qualitative interviews,
the chapter provides insights into how a researcher’s assumptions can run
counter to an interviewee’s perceptions and viewpoints. This chapter
contributes to the understanding that the choice of language for conducting
interviews with multilingual speakers is no trivial matter.

Chapter 8: “But You’re Gonna Ask Me Questions, Right?”: Interactional Frame
and “For-the-record” Orientation in Language Biography Interviews (Daniela
Veronesi)

This chapter examines the negotiation of the interview framing that speakers
participated in during language biography interviews that she conducted with
people living in South Tyrol, a province in northern Italy. The results show
that sometimes interviewers and interviewees orient to different interviewing
frames and goes on to explore how speakers negotiate participation frameworks
and conversation roles and obligations. This chapter emphasizes the joint
production of interviews, and moves researchers away from following “rules”
and “prescriptions” to focusing on the here and now that constitutes the
interview interaction itself.

Chapter 9: “It Doesn’t Make Sense, but It Actually Does”: Interactional
Dynamics in Focus Group Interaction (Hanbyul Jung)

This chapter explores excerpts from a focus group conducted as part of an
evaluation study of a teacher development program for Korean EFL (English as a
foreign language) teachers in the United States. Data examined in this chapter
illuminated the complexity and contingencies involved in the generation of
group talk, and how a specific group of people act in concert with one another
in producing opinions and perspectives. The chapter also highlights the
pitfalls of relying on an interview as research instrument (Talmy, 2010)
perspective to analyze talk without attending to the specific interactional
dynamics within a particular group.

Chapter 10: Continuers in Research Interviews: A Closer Look at the
Construction of Rapport in Talking about Interfaith Dialogue (Elizabeth M.
Pope)

This chapter examines Elizabeth M. Pope’s contributions to interaction in
telephone interviews with a participant whom she had recruited for a study
focusing on religious beliefs and interfaith dialogue. It explores how Pope’s
contributions develop and change over the course of a three-interview sequence
of interviews conducted via telephone. The significance of this chapter is
that it shows how mundane utterances – however minimal – do matter for how
interviews are achieved.

Chapter 11: Discourse Strategies of Mitigation in an Oral Corpus of Narratives
of Life Experience Collected in Interviews (Carla Aurélia de Almeida)

This chapter explores excerpts from life experience narratives collected in
Portugal using a variety of analytic tools drawn from conversation analysis,
membership categorization analysis, speech act theory, and discursive
psychology. The author explores the conversational resources used by
interviewers to forward interaction, and identifies a variety of discourse
strategies that interviewers use to mitigate their epistemic obligations
within the interview. Working across a large data set of narrative interviews,
the author observes and analyzes both the interviewers’ and interviewees’
actions, once again highlighting in detail how interviewers and interviewees
collaboratively work together to support one another in interaction.

Part IV: Summing Up

Chapter 12: The Way(s) of Interviewing: Exploring Social Studies of Interviews
(Tim Rapley)

In this concluding chapter, the author offers some thoughts about how this
volume extends existing methodological literature on qualitative interviewing,
as well as further ideas for exploration. It shows how this volume offers a
future direction for a range of work, including a focus on different modes or
forms of interviews, identities and epistemics, as well as the role of the
interview schedule. This chapter also suggests a trajectory of work that looks
both across and beyond the spaces of the interview interactions.

EVALUATION

This book is nicely presented with each chapter contributing an important
aspect of qualitative research interviews. It makes a substantial
methodological contribution to how we might complicate taken-for-granted
understanding of qualitative research interviews as straight-forward
information gathering tools. Each chapter in this book presents deep insight
into the inner workings of particular interviews, thereby forgoing new ways of
looking at what goes on, and hopefully inspiring other researchers to engage
in similar sorts of exploration. Just as Garfinkel engaged students in what he
called “tutorial problems” in order for them to make sense of the social
construction of embodied social actions (Rawls, 2002:33), the research
demonstrated in this book will likely be fully comprehensive only when readers
do this kind of work themselves with their own data sets. 

The different chapters in this book, although examining diverse topics, are
united by their focus on closely examining interview interaction within
sequential contexts and on the discursive strategies used to forward interview
interaction. Authors added to our understanding of how the identities of
interviewers and interviewees matter for how questions are asked and answered,
as well as what this means for the generation of data for research purposes.
In addition, whether interview interaction involves the supportive work of
displaying listenership, negotiating the participation framework of how an
interview is to proceed, the negotiation of disagreeing viewpoints, use of
conversational resources to mitigate description, or use of multiple languages
to account for personal experiences and viewpoints, excerpts show that
interviews are finely-coordinated among speakers monitoring one another’s
utterances and actions on a turn-by-turn basis. All authors in this book took
a “second look” (C. D. Baker, 1983) at their interviews in order to re-examine
what went on. Topics discussed in this volume are those that stood out –
although there are no doubt many more. It is hoped that the chapters in this
book will prompt researchers who use interviews to take a second look at their
own data in order to see what stands out.

REFERENCES

Baker, Carolyn D. 1983. A “second look” at interviews with adolescents.
Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 12 (6): 501-519. 

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall.

Heritage, John. 2013. Epistemics in conversation. In Handbook of conversation
analysis, edited by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers, 370-394. Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell.

Heritage, John. 2018. The ubiquity of epistemics: A rebuttal to the
“epistemics of epistemics” group. Discourse studies, 20 (1): 14-56. 

Rawls, Anne Warfield. 2002. Editor’s introduction. In Ethnomethodology’s
program: Working out Durkheim’s aphorism, edited by Anne Warfield Rawls, 1-64.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Talmy, Steven. 2010. Qualitative interviews in applied linguistics: From
research instrument to social practice. Annual review of applied linguistics,
30: 128-148.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mr. Zhi Huang is an Australian NAATI Certified Translator between Chinese and
English languages. Having completed PhD in Linguistics at Macquarie
University, Master of Advanced Translation at Macquarie University and Master
of Education in TESOL at the University of Sydney, he now works as Academic
Manager at Sydney Institute of Interpreting and Translating. His research
interests involve English language teaching, teacher quality, translation
theory and pedagogy.





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