Qualitative interviewing The art of hearing data

The Journal of Higher Education,Vol. 75,No. 1 (January/February 2004)Copyright ©

2004 by The Ohio State University Review Essay

Interviews and the Philosophy of Qualitative Research

Interviewing as Qualitative Research:A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences,by Irving Seidman (2nd ed.). New York:Teachers College Press,1998.

InterViews:An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing,by Steinar Kvale. Thousand Oaks,CA:Sage,1996.

Qualitative Interviewing:The Art of Hearing Data,by Herbert J. Rubin and Irene S. Rubin. Thousand Oaks,CA:Sage,1995.

PATRICKDILLEY,Southern Illinois University

Interviewing is key to many forms of qualitative educational research;we interview respondents for oral histories,life histories,ethnographies,and case studies (see Tierney & Dilley,2002,for an overview of inter-viewing in education). Despite the primacy of verbal data in qualitativeresearch,basic introductions to qualitative research (including Glesne &Peshkin,1992; Merriam,1998; and Rossman & Rallis,1998) and “howto”guides for conducting qualitative projects (such as Goodall,2000)include only sections on interviewing. Only within the past decade havebook-length explorations of interviewing been produced for an audienceof educational researchers (as opposed to,say,anthropologists or sociol-ogists). Of those,three specifically acknowledge the philosophical foun-dations of interview methodologies. Each examines,

in complementaryways,the relationships between philosophy and protocol,epistemologyand research,words and meanings.Irving Seidman’s Interviewing as Qualitative Research(1998) isgrounded in the phenomenological tradition of three distinct,thematicinterviews designed to question meanings of experience. I find his workis a good starting point for training new researchers,not because thestructure of phenomenological interviewing is better than other forms ofqualitative interviewing,but because Seidman ties the core of phenome-nology to the qualitative philosophy. “Interviewing,”Seidman writes,provides access to the context of people’s behavior and thereby provides away for researchers to understand the meaning of that behavior. A basic as-sumption in in-depth interviewing research is that the meaning people makeof their experience affects the way they carry out that experience. . . . Inter-viewing allows us to put behavior in context and provides access to under-standing their action. (1998,p. 4)Meaning is not “just the facts,”but rather the understandings one hasthat are specific to the individual (what was said) yet transcendent of thespecific (what is the relation between what was said,how it was said,what the listener was attempting to ask or hear,what the speaker was at-tempting to convey or say). Just as language signifies and is constitutedby specifics and abstracts,so too does qualitative research—and inter-viewing in particular. There are skills—physical,social,mental,com-municative—that embody the act of interviewing,but those alone willnot determine answers to research questions. For such determinations,budding researchers must learn the skill of comprehension,the complexaptitude and competence of reflection and representation which are perhaps ultimately unteachable by any method than trial and error. AsSeidman states,Researchers must ask themselves what they have learned from doing the in-terviews,studying the transcripts,marking and labeling them,crafting pro-files,and organizing categories of excerpts. What connective threads arethere among the experiences of the participants they interviewed? How dothey understand and explain these connections? What do they understandnow that they did not understand before they began the interviews? Whatsurprises have there been? What confirmations of previous instincts? Howhave their interviews been consistent with the literature? How inconsistent?How have they gone beyond? (Seidman,1998,pp. 110–111)Those are questions for the interviewer,a continuing conversationwith one’s self about the nature of how we have learned what we know.Interviews should allow us to investigate,in critical ways,our respon-dents’comprehensions of their experiences and beliefs—as well as ourown. Of course,the structure of the interview event shapes the meanings128The Journal of Higher Educationmade (and conveyed) by both the interviewer and the respondent. Seid-man emphasizes structuring interview projects and protocols in particu-lar ways to develop this understanding,but appears open to the notionthat different questions,which would require different ways of knowingor comprehending,would require different ways of asking questions. Iconcur with Seidman’s approach to ensuring such efforts are at the heartof interview projects and analyses,not a check-and-balance additive.What are needed are not formulaic approaches to enhancing either validityor trustworthiness but understanding of and respect for the issues that under-lie those terms. We must grapple with them,doing our best to increase ourways of knowing and of avoiding ignorance,realizing that our efforts arequite small in the larger scale of things. (Seidman,1998,p. 20)Where Seidman concentrates upon the structure of the interview eventand research project,Herbert J. Rubin and Irene S. Rubin,in QualitativeInterviewing(1995),emphasize a different set of necessary skills inqualitative interviewing:“the art of hearing data.”The Rubins reiterateinterviewing’s epistemological origins:“Qualitative interviewing is away of finding out what others feel and think about their worlds.Through qualitative interviews you can understand experiences and re-construct events in which you did not participate”(Rubin & Rubin,1995,p. 1). They,too,place an emphasis upon comprehending and con-veying understandings of the researched and the researcher.The Rubins base their recommendations—including practical strate-gies—in a qualitative research philosophy that meshes nicely with Seid-man’s. Moving beyond the craft of structuring interviews,Rubin andRubin propose that making sense of interview data requires a paradigmof learning and understanding that is far from positivistic:“Qualitativeinterviewing is more than a set of skills,it is also a philosophy,an ap-proach to learning”(Rubin & Rubin,1995,p. 2).Rubin and Rubin outline three components of what they term a quali-tative “philosophy,an approach to learning”(1995,p. 2):first,“under-standing is achieved by encouraging people to describe their worlds intheir own terms;”second,“interviewing involves a relationship betweenthe interviewer and the interviewee that imposes obligations on bothsides;”and finally,“the philosophy helps define what is interesting andwhat is ethical [as well as to] provide standards to judge the quality ofthe research,the humanity of the interviewing relationship,and the com-pleteness and accuracy of the write-up”(Rubin & Rubin,1995,p. 2). Ifind Qualitative Interviewingan informative,needed,philosophicallygrounded text that clearly conveys the complexities of howqualitative