Case Study 3:

A postmodern critique of interviewing

 

Interviewing is a key methodology for qualitative research. Any general text will contain a chapter on interviewing, stressing technical details such as:

However, as Scheurich (1997, p.61) points out, these approaches rarely problematise the interview itself as a research tool. It is seen, rather, as ‘an unproblematic method to gathering qualitative data’. Scheurich’s argument is that, while theorists in a variety of disciplines have widely disseminated their views on the problematic and complex relationships between language and meaning, none of this seems to have touched interviewing as a typical modernist research method. Rather, language is treated as a transparent medium for communicating a ‘reality’ from interviewee to interviewer, and vice versa. The interviewer’s job is functional not critical: to elicit a response and to systematise the responses. The rigour of the method rests largely with the quality of coding responses and drawing theoretical models from this, not with questioning at root ‘the radical openness or indeterminacy within the intersection of language, meaning, and communication … that exceeds the constraints of a determinate, knowable order of reality.’

Scheurich’s ground for critique is then Derrida’s notion of ‘surplus’ – that any attempt at capturing a ‘reality’ through representation (first through gathering the data by interview, and then through coding) is bound to miss a surplus that is beyond the striving for ‘meaning’, ‘truth’, ‘veracity’ or ‘closure’. While recognising the feasibility constraints of any research method, postmodernists suggest that what is missed in the interview is as, or perhaps more, important than what is captured. Further, what is captured cannot simply be treated as transparent (the issue of representation). The most obvious case is the inability of audiotaped interviews (perhaps the most common method of data collection after questionnaires) to capture the non-verbal realm. Further, the gathered data are totally decontextualised. The reduction of a complex communication exchange is then further exacerbated through coding and thematic methods that claim to reveal patterns, where, from a constructionist viewpoint, the researcher is active in producing, not discovering, such patterns. These codes and themes do not necessarily exist in the intentions or experiences of the interviewee, yet the ethical interviewer makes every effort in other directions to make sure that the interviewee is not misrepresented. Indeed, where validity checks are offered through corroboration (the interviewee reading the transcripts), it is not uncommon to find that interviewees do not choose to take up this time-consuming offer, and, where they do, there are many tacit pressures upon them to accept the authority of the interviewer’s text.

In gathering the data, Scheurich (1997, p.62) points to the potential mismatch that can occur throughout the interview process. No matter how concerned the interviewer, or how non-intrusive, ‘What a question or answer means to the researcher can easily mean something different to the interviewer’. Second, there is, as mentioned above, the ever-present nature of language itself, that presents inherent instability, contested meanings, ambiguity, open-endedness, and grounding in contexts. Language is ‘subject to endless reinterpretation’. A reply in one context has a certain agreed meaning that is lost to another context. The interview context itself, the time, place, subject matter and relationship between interviewer and interviewee with their differing perspectives, desires and agendas, provides internal instability and play of meanings, and, again, can be seen to construct, rather than reveal, meanings. The process also constructs identities – those of ‘interviewer’ and ‘interviewee’ - and these identities come to exert patterns of power and resistance, in turn constructing new meanings. Where the modernist researcher sees these factors as ‘contaminating’ variables to be controlled through efforts of consistency and sampling, the postmodernist interviewer sees these as important factors in situated (contextualised) and specific conversations that need to be reflexively noted, as I am doing in this account. This does not mean that researchers in the postmodern do not utilise the interview method.

Following Scheurich’s critique, the conventional distinction between data collection and data analysis collapses, as both stages suffer from the twin possibilities of (mis)representation and interviewer constructions. Scheurich (1997, p.63) notes that the ideal of accurate representation of an interviewee’s meanings, as claimed by modernist method, is an illusion. The interview process is ‘a creative conversation’ constituting its own meanings. There is a two-stage process of ‘virtualisation’ of data: first, the conversations in interviews are wholly decontextualised from their referents. Second, coding and thematic analysis decontextualises the data from the interview context in which it was gathered (thus being wholly unreflexive about how contexts generate meanings).

There are possible pragmatic and creative responses to these critiques. In a recent piece of research looking at how consultants teach junior doctors on ward rounds, I based interviews conducted immediately after ward rounds upon viewing interviewee-selected segments of videotape of the rounds, thus maintaining some degree of contextualisation for response (Bleakley, 2002). I then interviewed junior doctors, and triangulated both interviews with my own ethnographic notes made on the wards, reviewed in light of viewing the videotape data, and reflexively reviewed my own readings through workshop presentations in other hospitals, reflexively discussing the status of the data. In a postmodern practice, the researcher has an ethical responsibility for reflexive awareness.

Scheurich thus describes how coding and thematic analysis, supposedly introducing rigour through systematising, irons out intrinsic and necessary uncertainties in the relationship between language and meaning. The use of such coding devices is largely based upon a quasi-scientific pressure for rational presentation of data. Scheurich (1997, p.63) notes the irony that while ‘elaborate and arcane’ mechanics of coding absorbs qualitative researchers, they have ‘no corresponding focus on the complex ambiguities of language, communication and interpretation’. A compound ‘virtualisation’ of the data occurs where researchers then promote a ‘story’ of their own from decontextualised data supposed to offer an accurate representation of the interviewee’s reality. The story of the researcher has brought a false and temporary stability to ‘slippery’ data. This is not a conscious fabrication on the part of the researcher, but a product of their socialisation (and identity construction) into modernist practice. The end result is that ‘all the juice of the lived experience’ of the interviewee ‘has been squeezed out’ through the interview method. Ryan (1989, pp.1-2) concurs, describing such interviewing as a ‘rhetorical reduction of complexity to simplicity, of differential relations to firm identities, … of diffusely textured situations to tightly boundaried containers, of webs of feeling to numbing objectification.’ Scheurich (1997, p.64) suggests that ‘Modernist research does not describe, it inscribes.’ The end point of the manipulations of interview data tells us more about the mindset of the researcher than the world of the interviewee.

Such a tendency is compounded where researchers derive theoretical models through grounded theory from their data, such as typologies. In an exercise below, you will be asked to read an archetypal case of such research process (Oplatka, 2001), in which the researcher claims to have ‘discovered’ a typology of four strategies for dealing with ‘mid-life’ potential career burn-out amongst women school principals (head teachers) in Israel. While the author claims that the typologies ‘emerge’ from the data (and are then valid and transparent representations of an underlying reality), the postmodernist is sceptical of this claim, seeing rather a construction derived from the researcher’s own productive mechanisms of inquiry (‘inscription’ rather than ‘description’). The perceived typology is then not ‘in’ the lives of the interviewees, but ‘in’ the method of the interviewer. This does not mean that the typology is not interesting in its own right. However, it does cast doubt upon the status of the typology as a theory with explanatory power. Also, it raises the ethical (and aesthetic) question of the lack of reflexive inquiry on behalf of the researcher in noting this mode of construction of knowledge, where, elsewhere in the researcher’s method there is a desire to reduce potential bias through attention to validity.

Scheurich describes two further objections to modernist research interviewing: the false ‘ideal’ of joint construction of meaning, and the misguided notion of ‘empowerment’ of interviewees through method. The first point can be linked back to the previous section on life history, which appeared to stress the value of collaboration between the researcher and subject. Scheurich (1997, pp.66-7) offers a stiff warning against idealising such collaborative ventures, especially where they promise joint construction of meaning, for ‘interactions and meaning are a shifting carnival of ambiguous complexity, a moving feast of differences interrupting differences.’ Most importantly, ‘Sometimes the participants are jointly constructing meaning, but at other times one of them may be resisting joint constructions.’ On this point of resistance, Scheurich notes that the striving in emancipatory and action research to empower participants reads the researcher-subject relationship as a potential play of sovereign power by the authority figure (researcher) over the potentially oppressed subject. This reading, however, paradoxically offers potential oppression, or is paternalistic in its own right. It frames the subject as passive and does not credit the subject with creative ways of resistance, including guiding the interview away from the desires of the interviewer. This point will be deliberated later in Case Study 5: Discourse Evaluation.

The dominance-resistance binary in its own right offers a reductive way of reading the research interview, and Scheurich (1997, p.72) suggests a more complex and open-ended possibility. Utilising Derrida’s deconstructive method, Scheurich notes that ‘resistance’ ‘is not an open possibility, it is a closed determination’. To return to Hegel’s master:slave dialectic mentioned elsewhere, there is no master (dominance) without slave (resistance), and vice versa. What is interesting to the postmodernist is whatever ‘escapes or exceeds’ the binary, which Scheurich describes as ‘an openness or freedom for the interviewer or interviewee’. Both interviewer and interviewee may be playing out desires that subvert, invert or otherwise distort the orthodoxy of the interview process. Scheurich asks (rhetorically) if these can be given free rein and if they can be productive within the research without being reduced to the politics of the dominance:resistance binary. In other words, is there a creative surplus to this binary that could be the focus of the interview as research method?

If the interview situation is fundamentally indeterminate, and there is no final meaning to the interview or stable reality to be represented, as I have insisted above, this does not lead to abandoning the interview as a methodology. Rather it means re-visioning the interview with such notions in mind. The interviewee must be reflexive, noting epistemological preferences and social positionality, and the interview process should recognise its inherent indeterminacy as potential, not as a call to even more control, closure, systematising and validity checks, in the name of ‘rigour’. In the language of Michel Foucault’s discourse method, discussed elsewhere (Case Study 5), regimes of methodological ‘rigour’, such as coding and thematic analysis, bring their own ‘disciplining’ of data (through the research act) and produce their own resistances (exemplified by Scheurich’s critique). Scheurich (1997, pp.74-5) suggests that we should conduct research upon interviewing itself to open up ‘experimentation with interviewing and with ways to represent interviews that highlight the indeterminacy of interview interactions’ and offer ‘new imaginaries of interviewing’.

Scheurich does not detail his ‘new imaginaries of interviewing’, he offers a pragmatic challenge to the research community. Who will now take up this challenge? How might we ‘revision’ interviewing? For example, do styles of interviewing in the media, from interrogative news and current affairs pundits, to varieties of chat shows, offer us possible models for research method?

For a more flexible and imaginative view of the possibilities of the interview in research than is usually offered in methodology texts, see Chapters 3, 4 and 5 in Bauer and Gaskell (eds) (2000).

 

Exercise 2

As an initial response to Scheurich’s challenge, think of a situation in which you have been an interviewer or interviewee in a research context. If you have not had this experience, seek out and talk to somebody who has. Note briefly a possible ‘new imaginary’ of interviewing – a new way of seeing and doing. How might the interview in question have been conducted differently? Could there have been attention to the form of the interview, such as the quality of conversation and dialogue (the aesthetic dimension), or to the interviewer’s reflexive awareness (the ethical dimension)?

Email me your response:

alan.bleakley@rcht.cornwall.nhs.uk

 

copy to:

alanbleakley@yahoo.co.uk

 

Exercise 3

Now briefly review:

The exercise is to apply the critiques garnered thus far from postmodern perspectives to the article:

Building a Typology of Self-Renewal: Reflection Upon Life-Story Research by Izhar Oplatka (2001).

You can download this from:

http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR6-4/oplatka.html

The article was first published in The Qualitative Report, Vol.6, No.4, Dec. 2001 (16 pages), and offers a summary of work towards a now completed PhD thesis.

This article claims to draw out a typology of ways women school principals in mid-life, who have reached a career crisis point, work with, or through, that crisis. In what sense might Oplatka be ‘inscribing’ his own typology, rather than ‘describing’ a ‘found’ typology emerging from grounded theory method? To what extent do validity checks involving checking the emergent theory and typology with the participants offer a challenge to the ‘inscription’ notion of constructionism?

 

References

Bauer, M.W. and Gaskell, G. (eds) (2000) Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound. London: Sage.

Bleakley, A. (2002) Pre-registration house officers and ward-based learning: a ‘new apprenticeship’ model. Medical Education, 36:1, pp. 9-15.

Building a Typology of Self-Renewal: Reflection Upon Life-Story Research by Izhar Oplatka (2001). <http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR6-4/oplatka.html>

Ryan, M. (1989) Politics and Culture: Working Hypotheses for a Post-revolutionary Society. London: Macmillan.

Scheurich, J.J. (1997) Research Method in the Postmodern. London: Falmer Press.