Interviewing in the social sciences - A contribution to methodological discourse

In modern social science, interviewing has been widely used as a method of data collection. Still, what we think we Know about interviewing is usually based on a few common-sense conceptions of language use, wedded to a limited repertoire of methodological concepts and tools. Since the interview is a common event in the dominant speech communities of our society, we take it for granted that we know its potentials and problems both as a form of communication and as a research strategy. Thus, the use of interviews in social science research is often accounted for in offhand and methodologically unconvincing ways. In current methodological literature, different conceptions of the exemplary interview are related to different theoretical perspectives, as well as to more basic epistemological and ontological positions. Some describe interviews as a way of collecting verbalised responses from a sample of interviewees to a set of more or less structured verbal stimuli. But interviews are also discussed as a particular form of verbal communication in which knowledge is constructed in a process involving both elements of dialogue and negotiations about the definition of situations, contexts, and frameworks of interpretation. The present article delineates a perspective on interviewing as a form of dialogic, contextualised and situated discourse. At the same time, it calls for a broader debate on the use of interviewing in social science research.