The Interview as an Interactional Event

Abstract

The interview is a very common and popular data collection tool in the social sciences. However, interviews are also important tools to collect information in many other non-academic practices, such as asylum seekers’ procedures. Researchers and practitioners working with interviews (particularly in the area of narrative, which is the one that has the most bearing on the case of asylum seekers) tend to regard the interview merely as a container for meanings that are basically constructed and expressed by the interviewee. Therefore, they focus their analyses of interview data exclusively on the interviewee, without considering the role of the interviewer in eliciting/negotiating those data or the patterns of interaction occurring between the participants.

These tendencies have very significant consequences on the way data are understood, in that they lead researchers to abstract narratives from their contexts of occurrence and therefore often to generalize positions that interviewees may take as a response/follow-up, or even as a concession to interviewer’s questions and statements. However, the consequences of this approach are even more serious for practitioners working with interviews, since abstracting from contexts inevitably leads them to overlook the questioners’ role and influence on the interviewee. This chapter focuses on two simple facts:

• (a) The interview is an interactional event in its own right, and an event in which both interviewer and interviewee are faced with delicate positioning issues;

• (b) Such factors as the identity of the interviewer and of the interviewee, the topic of the interview, the immediate (and wider social) context in which the interview is embedded, all have an impact on the way this event develops, and cannot be ignored.

Transcription Conventions

((smiling))	Non-linguistic actions
(...)	Inaudible
(.)	Brief pause
.	Falling intonation followed by noticeable pause (as at end of declarative sentence)
?	Rising intonation followed by noticeable pause (as at end of interrogative sentence)
,	Continuing intonation: may be a slight rise or fall in contour (less than "." or "?"); may be not followed by a pause (shorter than "." or "?")
-	Self-interruption
=	Latched utterances by the same speaker or by different speakers
::	Vowel or consonant lengthening
[	Overlap between utterances
(line)	Highlights key phenomena.
@	Laughter (the amount of @ roughly indicates the duration of laughter)
@word@	Smiley voice
	High pitch