Ethnographic Interviewing

[Page 369]Researchers in an ever-increasing number of disciplinary and applied fields have been turning to ethnographic interviewing to help gather rich, detailed data directly from participants in the social worlds under study. Indeed, the substantial number of chapters in this volume devoted to different substantive and disciplinary-related areas attests to the wide variation in research contexts within which ethnographic interviewing takes place today. For example, beyond anthropology and sociology, the fields of medicine, education, psychology, communication, history, science studies and art have seen a dramatic increase in projects utilizing qualitative methods of various kinds, including ethnographic interviewing.

Ethnographic interviewing is one qualitative research technique that owes a major debt to cultural anthropology, where interviews have traditionally been conducted on-site during lengthy field studies. However, researchers from a variety of disciplines conduct on-site, participant observational studies, although typically shorter than those carried out by anthropologists. In addition, researchers regularly devise non-participant research projects that center on a set of unstructured, in-depth interviews with key informants from a particular social milieu or with people from a variety of settings and backgrounds who have had certain kinds of experiences. The question arises whether these are all examples of ethnographic interviewing. Given that there is a great deal of overlapping terminology in the areas of qualitative research and ethnography (Atkinson and Hammersley, 1994; Reinharz, 1992: 18, fn. 3, 4; 46, fn. 5; Silverman, 1993: 23–9), the definition of ethnographic interviewing here will include those projects in which researchers have established respectful, on-going relationships with their interviewees, including enough rapport for there to be a genuine exchange of views and enough time and openness in the interviews for the interviewees to explore purposefully with the researcher the meanings they place on events in their worlds.

Thus, both the time factor – duration and frequency of contact – and the quality of the emerging relationship help distinguish ethnographic interviewing from other types of interview projects by empowering interviewees to shape, according to their world-views, the questions being asked and possibly even the focus of the research study.1 Also central to traditional ethnographic research is the focus on cultural meanings (Wolcott, 1982). As Spradley notes in The Ethnographic Interview, ‘The essential core of ethnography is this concern with the meaning of actions and events to the people we seek to understand’ (1979: 5), and the researcher's job in the ethnographic interview, then, is to communicate genuinely, in both subtle and direct ways that ‘I want to know what you know in the way that you know it…. Will you become my teacher and help me understand?’ (p. 34; emphasis added).2 Life history interviewing fits comfortably within the ethnographic tradition, since it is usually conducted over time, within relationships characterized by high levels of rapport, and with particular focus on the meanings the interviewees place on their life experiences and circumstances, expressed in their own language (Becker, 1970; Spradley, 1979: 24). These key definitional characteristics allow ethnographic interviewing to be distinguished from survey interviewing, including interviews with open-ended questions, because there is no time to develop respectful, on-going relationships.

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