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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
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.”
References
Abend, Gabriel. 2011. Thick concepts and the moral brain. European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie 52 (1): 143–172.
Atkinson, Paul, and David Silverman. 1997. Kundera’s immortality: The interview society and the invention of the self. Qualitative Inquiry 3 (3): 304–325.
Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Baker, Carolyn D. 2002. Ethnomethodological analyses of interviews. In Handbook of interview research: Context and method, eds. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein, 777–795. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Beauclair, Roxanne, Fei Meng, Nele Deprez, Marleen Temmerman, Alex Welte, Niel Hens, and Wim Delva. 2013. Evaluating audio computer assisted self-interviews in urban south African communities: Evidence for good suitability and reduced social desirability bias of a cross-sectional survey on sexual behaviour. BMC Medical Research Methodology 13: 11.
Becker, Howard S. 1996. The epistemology of qualitative research. In Ethnography and human development: Context and meaning in social inquiry, eds. Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard A. Shweder, 53–72. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Becker, Howard S. 1998. Tricks of the trade: How to think about your research while you’re doing it. University of Chicago press, 2008.
Becker, Howard S., and Blanche Geer. 1957. Participant observation and interviewing: A comparison. Human Organization 16 (3): 28–32.
Benney, Mark, and Everett C. Hughes. 1956. Of sociology and the interview: Editorial preface. American Journal of Sociology 62 (2): 137–142.
Berger, Peter L. 1967. The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion. New York: Anchor Books.
Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Carson, Richard T., Nicholas E. Flores, and Norman F. Meade. 2001. Contingent valuation: Controversies and evidence. Environmental and Resource Economics 19 (2): 173–210.
Christensen-Szalanski, Jay J.J., and Cynthia Fobian Willham. 1991. The hindsight bias: A meta-analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 48 (1): 147–168.
Cerulo, Karen A. 2014. Reassessing the problem: Response to Jerolmack and Khan. Sociological Methods & Research 43 (2): 219–226.
Cerulo, Karen A., and Janet M. Ruane. n.d. Dreams of a lifetime: How culture shapes our wishful imaginings.
Denzin, Norman K. 2001. The reflexive interview and a performative social science. Qualitative Research 1 (1): 23–46.
Deutscher, Irwin. 1966. Words and deeds: Social science and social policy. Social Problems 13 (3): 235–254.
Deutscher, Irwin. 1973. What we say/what we do: Sentiments and acts. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.
DiMaggio, Paul. 2014. Comment on Jerolmack and Khan, talk is cheap: Ethnography and the attitudinal fallacy. Sociological Methods & Research 43 (2): 232–235.
Drew, Paul, and John Heritage, eds. 1992. Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fourcade, Marion. 2011. Cents and sensibility: Economic valuation and the nature of “nature.” American Journal of Sociology 116 (6): 1721–1777.
Gerson, Kathleen, and Sarah Damaske. Forthcoming. The science and art of interviewing: How to learn about society by talking to people. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Glasman, Laura R., and Dolores Albarracín. 2006. Forming attitudes that predict future behavior: A meta-analysis of the attitude-behavior relation. Psychological Bulletin 132 (5): 778–822.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Pantheon.
Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein. 2012. Theoretical validity and empirical utility of a constructionist analytics. The Sociological Quarterly 53 (3): 341–359.
Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein. 2002. From the individual interview to the interview society. In Handbook of interview research: Context and method, eds. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein, 3–32. London: Sage.
Ho, Wing-Chung. 2012. The limit of the discursive: A critique of the radical constructionist approach to family experience. The Sociological Quarterly 53 (3): 321–340.
Ho, Wing-Chung. 2019. Ethnographic inquiry and lived experience: An epistemological critique. London: Routledge.
Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium. 1995. The active interview. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Igo, Sarah E. 2007. The averaged American: Surveys, citizens, and the making of a mass public. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jerolmack, Colin, and Shamus Khan. 2014a. Talk is cheap: Ethnography and the attitudinal fallacy. Sociological Methods & Research 43 (2): 178–209.
Jerolmack, Colin, and Shamus Khan. 2014b. Toward an understanding of the relationship between accounts and action. Sociological Methods & Research 43 (2): 236–247.
Jerolmack, Colin, and Iddo Tavory. 2014. Molds and totems: Nonhumans and the constitution of the social self. Sociological Theory 32 (1): 64–77.
Kameo, Nahoko. 2015. Gifts, donations, and loose coupling: Responses to changes in academic entrepreneurship among bioscientists in Japan. Theory and Society 44 (2): 177–198.
Katz, Jack. 2001. From how to why: On luminous description and causal inference in ethnography (part I). Ethnography 2 (4): 443–473.
Lamont, Michèle. 1992. Money, morals, and manners: The culture of the French and the American upper-middle class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lamont, Michèle, and Virág Molnár. 2002. The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 28 (1): 167–195.
Lamont, Michèle, Graziella Moraes Silva, Jessica S. Welburn, Joshua Guetzkow, Nissim Mizrachi, Hanna Herzog, and Elisa Reis. 2016. Getting respect: Responding to stigma and discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lamont, Michèle, and Ann Swidler. 2014. Methodological pluralism and the possibilities and limits of interviewing. Qualitative Sociology 37 (2): 153–171.
LaPiere, Richard T. 1934. Attitudes vs. actions. Social Forces 13 (2): 230–237.
Maynard, Douglas W., Jeremy Freese, and Nora Cate Schaeffer. 2010. Calling for participation: Requests, blocking moves, and rational (inter)action in survey introductions. American Sociological Review 75 (5): 791–814.
Maynard, Douglas W., and Nora Cate Schaeffer. 1997. Keeping the gate: Declinations of the request to participate in a telephone survey interview. Sociological Methods & Research 26 (1): 34–79.
O’Brien, John. 2015. Individualism as a discursive strategy of action: Autonomy, agency, and reflexivity among religious Americans. Sociological Theory 33 (2): 173–199.
Pager, Devah, and Lincoln Quillian. 2005. Walking the talk? What employers say versus what they do. American Sociological Review 70 (3): 355–380.
Peña-Alves, Stephanie. 2019. Outspoken objects and unspoken myths: The semiotics of object-mediated communication. Symbolic Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.464.
Pugh, Allison J. 2013. What good are interviews for thinking about culture? Demystifying interpretive analysis. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1 (1): 42–68.
Reed, Isaac A. 2010. Epistemology contextualized: Social-scientific knowledge in a postpositivist era. Sociological Theory 28 (1): 20–39.
Reed, Isaac A. 2011. Interpretation and social knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ricœur, Paul. 1973. The model of the text: Meaningful action considered as a text. New Literary History 5 (1): 91–117.
Riesman, David, and Mark Benney. 1956. The sociology of the interview. The Midwest Sociologist 18 (1): 3–15.
Rinaldo, Rachel, and Jeffrey Guhin. 2019. How and why interviews work: Ethnographic interviews and meso-level public culture. Sociological Methods & Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124119882471.
Salgueiro, Antonio Blanco. 2010. Promises, threats, and the foundations of speech act theory. Pragmatics 20 (2): 213–228.
Sana, Mariano, Guy Stecklov, and Alexander A. Weinreb. 2016. A test of the stranger-interviewer norm in the Dominican Republic. Population Studies 70 (1): 73–92.
Schaeffer, Nora Cate, and Douglas W. Maynard. 2002. Standardization and interaction in the survey interview. In Handbook of interview research: Context and method, eds. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein, 577–602. London: Sage.
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R., and Daniel Vanderveken. 1985. Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Simmel, Georg. 1994. Bridge and door. Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1): 5–10.
Spradley, James P. 1979. The ethnographic interview. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston.
Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of love: How culture matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tavory, Iddo, and Stefan Timmermans. 2013. A pragmatist approach to causality in ethnography. American Journal of Sociology 119 (3): 682–714.
Trouille, David, and Iddo Tavory. 2019. Shadowing: Warrants for intersituational variation in ethnography. Sociological Methods & Research 48 (3): 534–560.
Urbatsch, Robert. 2019. Gun-shy: Refusal to answer questions about firearm ownership. The Social Science Journal 56 (2): 189–195.
Vaisey, Stephen. 2014. The ‘attitudinal fallacy’ is a fallacy: Why we need many methods to study culture. Sociological Methods & Research 43 (2): 227–231.
Vaisey, Stephen, and Omar Lizardo. 2010. Can cultural worldviews influence network composition? Social Forces 88 (4): 1595–1618.
Weiss, Robert S. 1995. Learning from strangers: The art and method of qualitative interview studies. New York: Free Press.
Winchester, Daniel, and Kyle D. Green. 2019. Talking your self into it: How and when accounts shape motivation for action. Sociological Theory 37 (3): 257–281.
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.
Funding
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. The research for this paper was not supported by any external funding.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
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
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-020-09464-x