Class notes on
Interviewing

Interviewing

- types

• secret
• open-ended, unstructured
• structured
• surveys

- issues

• Need to be able to deal with embarrassment. A moment ago, you described your acquaintance Charlie as "an asshole". Are there different kinds of assholes?
• Best posture is often as apprentice or novice. "Teach me"
  • This may be hard to deal with for some. you are in 1-down position. Some compensate by become imperious in other ways
• some problems with this posture. 
  • Asking lower class residents what the causes of breast cancer are -- they feel you know the answers already, trying to see how stupid they are
  • this is why being an outsider is important
  • Also, sometimes get more information by evidently being in the know. 

- Descriptive questions

• need to realize that in a way, rather than having questions that you need answers to, its the other way around. the field is filled with responses people are making .. to unseen questions. what you don't understand are what the questions are.
  • reading an academic article
• repeated explanations and framings of what you are
• restating embodies nonjudgmental attitude which contributes to rapport.
• where possible don't ask for meaning (why ... , what do you mean by ... ), ask for usage. meaning implies justify, explain better, be better at being informant. better to ask what would you say if x was different, or what other kinds of situations would be described that way?
• Basic types are:
  • grand tour. a. would you describe the inside of a jail for me? b. what's a typical night at the bar like? c. What happened last night? d. show me around the office. e. can you play a game of  backgammon and tell what you are doing as you do it? f/  what happens in a project? tell me how it goes from beginning to end. g. draw me a map
    • getting list of culturally significant items, in native language
    • tell me story of hook up event
  • mini tour. smaller unit of experience. Tell me what happens in a phone call.
  • example questions. What's an example of "blowing it" ?
  • experience. What are some of the experiences you've had working with professors?
  • native language questions. How would people normally refer to getting drunk?
  • hypotheticals: if i were sitting in the back of the room, what kinds of things would i hear?
• Stories basically fit under descriptive
  • sex harassment 
• Mini-homework: rapid assessment of the 2nd year project. Interview 1 person. 

Definitions

• definitions: what is hooking up? [slides]
•  

Structural Questions

• Exploring the contents and structure of a cultural domain
• What kind of car did you buy? What other kinds of cars did you consider?
• Why didn't buy the X?  (negative question)
• Freelisting. What are some of the ways that you can get information?
• Successive freelisting. What illnesses have you had? What kinds of treatments are there for (illness A)
• Paired comparisons. How would you compare A with B? How are they similar? How are they different? Which one is better for ...
• Triads. BC, BU and MIT. Which one is most different? Why? 
• Pilesorts. 
• Maps -- physical and social
• Networks. 
  • causal
• Explanation principle. STructural questions often need to be framed and explained.
• Repetition principle. Need to repeat many times to elicit all items in a domain.

desc vs structural

• loosely, desc tend to syntagmatic while struct tend to be paradigmatic
• melody vs harmony

- Analyzing Interviews

1. learning the cultural referents of words and concepts. what every person knows about mice. children like, some adult females scared of them. can buy mouse poison. theme park and cartoons use mice as characters. subjects for scientific experiments in medicine. get rich building a better mousetrap. There's only a few things, but they are not given in the dictionary definition of mouse -- the 4-footed rodent with the pink nose.
2. emic ethnography is understanding the cultural items that populate respondents' worlds, and the relationships among those items. It's a network analysis. 
3. categories. things grouped. categories within categories. relationships between categories. boys is a category, so is girls, and they contrast with respect to children. Sequential relations like months of the year, steps in a wedding.