The topic of this workshop is the qualitative ("semi-structured", "unstructured", "narrative", "life-story") research interview, and in particular the collaborative work that interviewer and interviewee do to produce a talk that supposedly shows the interviewee's own mind on matters relevant to a research topic. How does the collaborative work shape the talk?
The qualitative research interview became a popular data-collection method on the back of the assumption that individual subjectivities are constituted by relatively stable mental structures and contents. That is: individuals act in their social world on the basis of what the things they encounter mean to them, and what the things mean to them is given by their knowledge - the categories of meaning they carry around with them in their heads and hearts, having acquired them through social learning and personal experience. The individual brings his or her knowledge to bear on each particular social interaction in which s/he takes part. The knowledge is there, already formed, in the mind, before a particular social interaction occurs, and it is still there after the particular interaction ends, usually no more than marginally modified. Relative to transient social situations, it is a stable structure of categories in the individual's mind. The transient social situations provide variable opportunities for the knowledge to be communicated. The qualitative research interview is traditionally about providing a transient social situation where the interviewee is encouraged to communicate his or her knowledge of matters relating to a research topic, comprehensively and truthfully.
Traditionally conceived, the qualitative research interview is a data-collection process where the interviewee is asked to speak in his or her own terms, unhindered by the researcher's own working categories. The interviewer's task is to encourage the interviewee to speak his or her mind without a fear of moral censure or embarrassment, to elaborate what s/he means and to narrate first-hand experiences. The interviewer strives to create a setting where the interviewee communicates personal knowledge of relevance to the research topic frankly, explicitly and at length.
The ethnomethodological challenge to this theoretical viewpoint is agnostic on the existence or otherwise of a stable structure and content in the individual's mind. The point is that such pre-given (or pre-situational) contents are not open to scientific investigation, although they are a frequent object of our speculative reasoning as we go about the business of our everyday lives - as we impute motives to actions that concern us, etc. Their pre-givenness (or pre-situatedness) is not open to scientific investigation, because all actions take place in concrete, local situations. And crucially, they take place reflexively, couched in mutual attention paid by interactants to their evolving, moment-by-moment local situation. The interactants monitor their interactive process and act collaboratively to make it, and themselves within it, recognizably orderly.
These processes of mutual orientation and reflexive collaborative action are open to scientific investigation. The instances can be recorded and analysed for the actions that produced their orderly character, or, if you like, for the actions through which the participants produced themselves and each other as co-participants in the same social process and as members of the same collectivity.
From the ethnomethodological viewpoint, the scientifically investigable local production of orderly social process occurs not through the interactants following a set of normative prescriptions, but through the interactants showing their actions to be oriented to certain norms. The interactants make their actions accountable by offering, so to speak, certain normative frameworks to be taken as relevant to them. When the other implicitly or explicitly acknowledges the relevance, the normative orientation becomes mutual and the interactants have achieved another moment of normative alignment on the basis of which they can continue.
Since its foundation by Harvey Sacks over thirty years ago, the discipline of Conversation Analysis has produced massive evidence and cumulative knowledge of the procedures that interactants use to do their collaborative work. CA shows that, in the course of any particular interaction, the norms that interactants demonstrably orient to (instantiate) can be various, but they always and constantly include those making up "the apparatus" or "machinery" of conversation itself. Participants in a conversation pay attention to turn-taking, adjacency pairs and recipient design.
In regard to turn-taking, participants construct their utterances so that their hearers can anticipate their ending and thus the next transition-relevant place where rules for selecting the next speaker apply. The turn-taking rules to which participants orient when they hear the coming of a transition-relevant place have been shown to be systemic (they have been formulated as a hierarchical set of "if-then" rules) in the case of entirely informal ("mundane" in CA jargon) everyday conversations between peers. Specific variations from these rules define the formality of more formal conversations, such as take place in institutional settings.
Adjacency pairs are pairs of utterances where the first part requires the second part for completion, forming a collaborative action which one speaker initiates and the other completes. A question demands an answer; a greeting has to be returned; invitations and offers have to be accepted or rejected, requests granted or declined; and assessments have to be agreed or disagreed with. Moreover: invitations, offers, requests and assessments are first parts of adjacency pairs where the second parts have to be formed to mark out a preference for a positive response. Acceptances and agreements are normally delivered quickly and succinctly while refusals and disagreements come with delays and elaborations that minimise, qualify and explain the negative verdict.
The adjacency pair that will be of particular interest to us in this workshop is assessment - agreement/disagreement. While informal conversation abounds in it, the research interview requires the interviewer to do professional neutrality by avoiding personal agreement or disagreement with the interviewee.
Recipient design refers to the particular ways which participants select for saying what they have to say. In theory, the same literal content could be delivered in umpteen different ways; in interactional practice however, the speaker constructs his or her contribution in the light of the momentary local situation, to achieve three things:
(1) that the hearer hears what is said as addressed to himself or herself, and especially to that aspect of his or her identity that is particularly relevant in the ongoing interaction;
(2) that the hearer hears it as fitting to the ongoing interaction; and
(3) that the hearer does not misinterpret the contribution and "where it's coming from", i.e., that s/he does not misinterpret the speaker's stance.
David Silverman (1998, pp. 6-7) sums up the CA viewpoint in this way:
Ordinarily, if we think about it at all, we assume that what we say reflects our state of mind. However, what Sacks is showing us is that, in practice, we construct our talk by reference to how it will be heard. By saying what we do, positioned in a particular place, we thus make available to our hearer(s) a particular reading of what we mean.
The implication is that speaking and hearing are activities rather than the passive transmission of thought processes.
The research interview, then, is an activity. It is neither an interviewer's activity of data-collection nor an interviewee's activity of self-expression. It is, first and foremost, a collaborative activity, where both parties align with one another to accomplish a special kind of talk.
There is an important additional point: the business of devising and taking turns, structuring interchanges with adjacency pairs and designing speech acts to make them right for their locally-situated recipient happens very fast - so fast in fact that it mostly escapes the participants' awareness let alone deliberate strategic manipulation. The interviewer may have been trained to be facilitative and ask open questions, but most of the complex interactional work s/he has to do s/he does the way s/he walks, with common "natural" skill, the usage of which comes into focused awareness only occasionally. The interviewee may have been brought up always to speak the truth or always to say whatever will please, but s/he too engages in the locally situated activity with native skill but little deliberate control.
It is of this fast, intricate and constructive but largely uncontrolled collaborative activity that the interviewee's utterances are a by-product.
The traditional notion of the interview as a data-collection process is probably wrong in assuming the interviewee to be a walking collection of stored data, i.e., of ready mental contents that remain the same across concrete situations and that can be divulged more or less intact. And, it is certainly wrong in assuming the interviewer ever to be able deliberately to facilitate a process where the relationship between the production of the interview and its data by-product can be actually known with sufficient precision to lay grounds for claims about the cross-situational validity of the by-product. Interviewers, of course, may experience some of their interviewees as sincere and others as evasive. How that comes about is a good topic for analytic investigation. Making that experience a basis for intuitive assessment of data validity is a lay members' practice of indeterminate objective worth. It remains so even when professional researchers do it.
Would you like to comment on any of these arguments?
In his University of York PhD thesis ('The Methods of Madness: Recognizing Delusional Talk', 1997), Derrol Palmer investigates psychiatric diagnostic practice. He finds that textbook definitions of delusional illness are primarily concerned with non-correspondence between what the patient claims to have experienced and what could be true in reality. In itself, however, such non-correspondence provides a blunt and unworkable criterion for distinguishing between someone who needs urgent psychiatric help and someone who can function quite well without it, despite claiming to have had extra-ordinary experiences like meeting a ghost or seeing UFOs with little green men. Psychiatrists exercise their clinical judgement on the basis of conversations with their patients. Palmer's analysis of these conversations shows that the grounds on which psychiatrists make their clinical judgements are consistent, albeit not explicable in terms of psychiatric definitions of delusion. The patient that is adjudged to be ill is the one who reports the bizarre experience straight-off, without introducing it conversationally, as a story that might be treated as strange (e.g.: "you'll never believe what happened when..."). In other words, the ill patient is the one who neglects recipient design in his or her conversation. This disengagement from orderly and accountable social interaction is treated as the crucial failing, not the unrealistic content of the patient's reports. Quite rightly, too, we might add, because it is the breakdown of a person's ability to participate in producing interactional accountability and order that makes his or her further social existence impossible.
The research interview is a social institution. It is that in two senses. Firstly, it is embedded in the cluster of formal organisations making up the knowledge apparatus of modern society. Behind every research interview, there lurks a university, a research institute, a market research company, an opinion pollster, or a social service provider, concerned with the production of authoritative knowledge. And secondly, the research interview involves a division of labour and responsibilities, with set roles, rights and obligations.
We can anticipate research interview interaction to be making its institutionality recurrently and systematically evident. If you were to hear an audioclip of a research interview, chances are that it would not take you long to recognize it as just that, without having been told anything about it beforehand. You would hear the participants orienting to a research (or at least some kind of institutional) agenda even if there were no explicit references to it in the particular stretch of talk caught in the audioclip.
There would be obvious asymmetries between the participants. One would be asking questions and the other answering them, or maybe one would be talking in extended monological turns while mainly "I am listening, please continue" tokens (uhuh, aha, ehm) would be heard from the other. And, if the audioclip were any longer than a minute or two, chances are that you would notice the person doing the listening being rather self-restrained in his or her participation, withholding exclamations and statements of agreement with the speaker's point of view. This self-restrained listening would be particularly noticeable in places where the speaker narrated a story of some concrete event that s/he had personally experienced, for such story telling is often highly interactive, with a lot of audience participation, when it takes place in the course of informal conversation between friends.
Can you think of any further likely distinguishing characteristics of research interview talk? Use the comments form to let us know.
Tim Rapley (2001) notes two ways in which qualitative research interviewers produce neutrality in their interview talk. They ask their questions in an open-ended and non-inquisitorial way that neither prejudges the answer nor presumes from what point of view it will be given. And secondly, they neither agree nor disagree with the "identity work" (personal opinions, assessments and points of view) that comes across in the interviewee's answer, acting instead as "a neutral monitor" of it. Mazeland and ten Have (1996) likewise note the production of interviewer's neutrality as a necessary aspect of research interview interaction. The interviewer does his or her speaking and listening so that it is hearably oriented to a research agenda, the prime reason why the interview is at all taking place. That means that s/he has to refrain from orienting to the personal life world per se that might be demonstrated or described by the interviewee.
And yet, because qualitative research interviewers demand the kind of personal talk from the interviewee that puts a person and his or her morals on display, they cannot sustain their neutrality in the monotonic manner of data-collecting bureaucrats. They have to produce personal rapport as well. Whether they achieved a rapport with their interviewee or whether the interviewee was "hard work" is indeed often a topic in reports by qualitative research interviewers on their field experiences.
In the course of a "good rapport" conversation, the business of maintaining conversational alignment goes smoothly, without the participants having to labour to correct misalignments, in addition to which the participants frequently voice agreement with one another.
To produce a "good rapport" research interview, the participants have to find ways of giving each other a lot of agreement, but refraining from agreements that would jeopardize the "neutral monitor" stance of the interviewer.
Thus Mazeland and ten Have (1996) observe that
research interviews seem to share the preference for agreement that is also generally found in ordinary conversations
but find this preference particularly evident in interchanges where the interviewer inserts either very brief summaries of what the interviewee has just said ("repeats"), or slightly more extended summaries cast in terms which suggest that what the interviewee has just said presents a pertinent case of a more general type or process ("formulations"). The latter type of recycling formulation has the added advantage of alluding to the research agenda that is the purpose of the interview. Both, however, tend to be followed by a "yes" from the interviewee, in effect punctuating the interviewee's testimonies by agreements.
This particular ethnomethod of interviewing by no means exhausts the repertoire of members' skills that are brought to bear on the production of research interviews. Bringing the wider repertoire into analytical awareness is a task for our case studies.
We can expect to find that interviewer and interviewee engage in collaborative work where they make their talk accountable in terms of relevance to a research agenda, and build up interactional sequences to suit the potentially conflicting demands of institutional neutrality and personal rapport.
Would you like to comment on any of these arguments?
This case study is of an interview that took place in the Czech language. I hope, however, that it is not necessary to know the language to hear something of the interviewer-interviewee (IR-IE) interaction - its tones and rhythms - in the short audioclips under discussion. The audioclips are accompanied by transcripts in the Czech original and in English translation. In analytical notes, references are made to particular sections (speaker turns) within the transcripts: IE1, IR1, IE2, etc. The audioclips are short, so that you can easily benefit from listening to them repeatedly while studying the transcripts and analytic notes.
The interview with Mrs Belinkova (pseudonym) was one of those that qualitative research interviewers hope for. The life story that got told was wide-ranging in its topics, it had its dramatic tales and self-reflective moments, and it supplied a lot of detailed information on the micro-processes of economic privatisation that were turning the post-communist country back into a capitalist democracy. What's more, it got told with minimum effort on the interviewer's part. Even now, ten years after the event, I still recall the warm-hearted thought I had as I drove away from Mrs B's farm: "wasn't I lucky to get her into my sample, that went really well". Rapport seemed to happen "naturally", but it behoves us to have a good look at the IR-IE collaboration that remains in evidence on the audio recording.
What ethnomethods came into use to achieve the production of a life-story research interview with personal rapport?
Out of the 93-minute recording, I made short audioclips of all the bits where IR as well as IE could be heard. Then I listened repeatedly to each in turn and wrote down notes on what action was constituted in the IR-IE interchanges. Here I present nine excerpts from the first eight minutes of the interview. They include all the occasions during the opening eight-minute period where IR is at all audible, but there are also two excerpts where IR remains silent.
If you are new to CA, please note that it will take time to work through the excerpts. They need to be worked through, not just read through.
This excerpt shows the opening 24 seconds of the interview audio recording. As it contains a birth date and place names that might conceivably jeopardise IE's anonymity, I present first a transcript of it with the date and place names sanitised, and then two audioclips accompanied by the appropriate bits from the transcripts, which do not contain any of the anonymity-jeopardising information.
Click here to see explanations of the transcription symbols in a separate window.
Transcript of Czech original:
IR1: kdybyste vysvetlila ten [vyber tech let]
IE1: [takze (.) narodila] jsem se v roce (letopocet) (.) chodila jsem teda do skoly nejdriv tady do (mistni jmeno) na zakladni skolu (slowing down) to byla jeste jeste skola (.)
IR2: narodila jste se v tomto dome?
IE2: ne, narodila jsem se v nemocnici v (mistni [jmeno])
IR3: [ne] ale, myslim (.) [bydlela jste]
IE3: [ano,] ano
IR4: [uhuh]
IE4: [ja] pochazim z tohoto domu (.)
English translation:
IR1: if you would explain the [choice of those years]
IE1: [so (.) I was ] born in year (19**) (.) I went then to school at first here in (placename) to primary school (slowing down) that was still still a school (.)
IR2: were you born in this house?
IE2: no, I was born in the hospital in (place[name])
IR3: [no] but, I mean (.) [did you live]
IE3: [yes,] yes
IR4: [uhuh]
IE4: [I]originate from this house (.)
Out of this excerpt, we can hear two audioclips. The first, Excerpt 01a, corresponds to this section of the above transcript:
IE1: ... na zakladni skolu (slowing down) to byla jeste jeste skola (.)
IR2: narodila jste se v tomto dome?
IE2: ne, narodila jsem se v nemocnici...
English translation of Excerpt 01a:
IE1: ... to primary school (slowing down) that was still still a school (.)
IR2: were you born in this house?
IE2: no, I was born in the hospital...
Click here to hear Excerpt 01a.
The second audioclip, Excerpt 01b, corresponds to this section of the overall Excerpt 01 transcript:
IE2: ....(mistni [jmeno])
IR3: [ne] ale, myslim (.) [bydlela jste]
IE3: [ano,] ano
IR4: [uhuh]
IE4: [ja] pochazim z tohoto domu (.)
English translation of Excerpt 01b:
IE2: ... (place[name])
IR3: [no] but, I mean (.) [did you live]
IE3: [yes,] yes
IR4: [uhuh]
IE4: [I] originate from this house (.)
Click here to hear Excerpt 01b.
The interview recording starts with IR referring to a lifeline that the IE had just drawn at IR's request, on which the IE had written down years "which were, for whatever reason, especially significant" in her life. IR1 opens the main part of the interview by asking the IE to explain her selection of significant years. IE1 shows her readiness for the task by starting her biographical talk before IR1 has finished his sentence. She starts with the word "so" ("takze"), indicating that what she is about to say follows on from what had been said before and relates to IR's request.
Audioclip 01a shows, first of all, quite an exceptional event. IE1 progressively slows down and pauses in mid-flow before IR2 comes in. Normally, conversational partners manage to take their speaking turns without this kind of grinding to a halt. Whatever the reason why this happened here, it shows the mutual monitoring that interactants do. IE responded, in this case in a rather unusual manner, to seeing IR's face or body posture signalling an intention to say something.
IR2's phrasing "were you born..." echoes IE1's "I was born...". We could hypothesise that this kind of echoing, or emulating each other's lexical choices where possible, is one of the things interactants do to produce a sense of mutual orientation and alignment. In this case, however, the echoing lexical choice turns out to be troublesome, because IR is interested not just if the IE comes from the locality, but if she comes specifically from the house in which she lives now (and in which the interview is taking place). This specific interest is relevant to the fact that the IE was in the research sample because she was a farm restituent, i.e., one of the Czech citizens who took advantage of the restitution law enabling them to restore private ownership over lands and assets that their parents or grandparents had lost to communist collectivisation. This circumstance, that it was her identity as farm restituent that was of particular relevance to the research agenda, is known to IE from the explanations IR gave for wanting to interview her. IR2's phrasing, however, is open to the literal interpretation evident in IE2's answer. IR3 therefore initiates a correction and IE3 supplies an affirmative answer to his question before he finishes his clarification of it. IR4's "uhuh" confirms the relevance of this answer.
IE4's confirmation of her affirmative answer is interesting by its precise lexical choice. IE could have said, e.g., "I'm from here". But she elected "I originate from this house". The latter part of this sentence echoes the latter part of IR2's "were you born in this house". The beginning, "I originate", makes the statement truthful and precise, whereas "I was born in this house" would have been untrue. It is, however, no more truthful than "I'm from this house" would have been. Its choice, however, is not a random pick from a range of several possible alternatives. In the Czech language, the verb "I originate" ("ja pochazim") is the one that would have been most likely used in a written biography, and unlikely to have been used in a casual conversation, where "I come from" or "I'm from" ("ja jsem z") would have been much more likely. Electing "I originate" evokes the vocabulary of written biographical genre and produces the talk as "official" or institutional, designed for IR's research agenda. It takes up IR2's implicit reference to the research agenda and affirms IE's orientation to it.
To sum up, Excerpt 01 shows:
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This excerpt follows immediately from Excerpt 01, IE picks up the thread she was starting when she was interrupted by IR's question.
Click here to hear Excerpt 02.
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IE: ...jeste skola jednotridky, jednotridka, ss takze (.) to uceni tam, ja na tom na to vzpominam, ze si kolikrat rikam, jestli jsem se tam vubec neco naucila, ale Asi Neco Prece Ano, protoze si zas myslim, ze (.) ze zas tak hloupa snad nejsem. I kdyz, co se pamatuju z ty skoly, z ty zakladky, meli jsme jeste vzdycky...
English translation of Excerpt 02:
IE: ...still a school of one class, a one-class school, ss so (.) the teaching there, as I recall it, sometimes I wonder, if I learnt there anything at all, but Maybe Something After All, because I do think, that (.) that I am not all that stupid. Although, from what I remember, from the primary school, we still used to have always...
In this excerpt, the first hesitation and pause - "...a one-class school, ss so (.)" - separates factual information about a village school (where pupils of all the years were taught in a single class) from an assessment of its educational effectiveness. IE states that the teaching she recalls makes her sometimes wonder if it taught her anything, but immediately asserts, with a marked emphasis on each word, that "Maybe Something After All". Then comes the second hesitation and a pause - "...do think, that (.) that" - which prefaces a conclusion of the assessment and the self-assessment, "I'm not all that stupid". I regard both occurences of speech hesitancy as actions rather than reflections of uncertainty in the speaker's mind. Speakers use hesitancy to show their interactants that they recognize what they are saying or about to say as possibly contestable and/or in some way a delicate topic. In this case, the first hesitancy marks out the beginning of an assessment and the second a self-assessment.
Assessments invite agreements. An assessment is the first part of an adjacency pair, where one interactant initiates an interchange where the other interactant proffers an agreement or maybe a disagreement. Withholding the second element of an adjacency pair is a normatively accountable act. That is what occurs in this excerpt - IR withholds an (dis)agreement from both the emphatically delivered "May Be Something After All" and "I am not all that stupid". IE, however, glosses over this by an immediate "although, from what I remember" and a resumption of a factual report on the school activities. IE thus treats IR's silence at this point as not disruptive, but normal, as something to be expected. In so doing, she treats the silence as normatively accounted for. She collaborates with IR in their production of a research interview where IR properly takes up the stance of professional neutrality vis-a-vis IE's personal identity work.
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This excerpt is a direct continuation of (in fact there is a one-second overlap with) Excerpt 02.
Click here to hear Excerpt 03.
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IE1: ... meli jsme jeste vzdycky (.) volno v utery (.) hlavne jsme teda delali na zahradce (.) [a]
IR1: [uhuh]
IE2: nebo vytvarnou vychovu...
English translation of Excerpt 03:
IE1: ... we still used to have always (.) free time on Tuesday (.) mostly we did gardening (.) [and]
IR1: [uhuh]
IE2: or art...
This is where IR delivers his first audible "I'm listening, do continue" token ("uhuh"). He does it immediately after IE's voice inflexion and a pause invite IR to upgrade his participation from silent listening. IE issues the invitation at a transition-relevance place, where the completion of the informational item about gardening might have conceivably moved IR to ask a question or make a comment, but at the same time the voice inflexion with which she mentions the gardening suggests that it is just one item in a list which will continue.
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This excerpt starts only 9 seconds after the end of the previous one. IR is not audible in it all.
Click here to hear Excerpt 04.
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IE: ... potom jsem chodila na jako vyssi jako zakladni skolu do (xxx) tam uz jsme jezdili autobusem (.) no to to bylo docela hezky. Potom byl takovej hlavni asi jako zlom tak to bylo ...
English translation of Excerpt 04:
IE: ... then I went to a sort of higher elementary school like to (xxx) there we went by bus (.) well that was quite nice. Then came perhaps a sort of major change that was ...
IE starts a report on her next stage of schooling. She delivers an informational item about commuting by bus with an upward voice inflexion and a pause, inviting a response from IR. When IR remains mute, IE concludes her report on this stage of schooling with a generalised positive evaluation and moves on to her next topic, which she introduces as "a sort of major change".
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This excerpt starts 11 seconds after the end of the previous one.
Click here to hear Excerpt 05.
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IE1: ... a mela jsem dvojce sestru, se sestrou jsme trosku vzdycky byly tak jako jsme souperily, a
IR1: [uhuh]
IE2: [vzdycky] ktera budeme lepsi a tak jako jsme (.) jako (.) to bylo mozna dobry i v tom, ze (.) jsme se porad jako snazily a ktera budeme lepsi=pritom jsme se mely hrozne radi ale zase jako dvojcata bych jako rekla ze jsme (.) zily na maly vesnici a byly jsme na sobe hrozne moc zavisly.
IR2: uhuh.
IE3: takze jsme ...
English translation of Excerpt 05:
IE1: ... and I had a twin sister, with my sister we sort of always had a bit of a rivalry going, and
IR1: [uhuh]
IE2: [always] which one of us will be better and so we (.) sort of (.) maybe that was good also in that (.) we tried hard like and which one of us will be better=while we loved each other awful lot but then again as twins I would say like that we (.) lived in a small village and were awful lot dependent on one another.
IR2: uhuh.
IE3: so we ...
IE's speech hesitancies mark out a delicate topic, her childhood relationship with a twin sister, which was complex by its mixture of rivalry, healthy competition, love and dependence. IR comes in with two "uhuhs", which upgrade his participation after a quiet stretch. This could have been expected, given that IE has prefaced the story she is now telling as "a sort of major change" (see Excerpt 04).
A comparison of IR's two "uhuhs" shows that IR1 is softer, its intonation echoes IE1's slightly elongated "a rivalry going" ("souperily"), and it overlaps with the start of IE2. IR2 is sligtly louder and more clipped, and it overlaps neither with the end of IE2 nor with the beginning of IE3. IR2 thus adds emphasis to IE2's "were awful lot dependent on one another", helping to make it into the conclusive main point about the twins' relationship (from which there followed a story of trauma caused by the twins having to go to separate schools).
Repeated focussed listening to IR's attention tokens ("uhuhs") suggests their importance for the production of IR-IE alignment. In addition, recalling the intensive monitoring of IR by IE revealed in Excerpt 01a, we might hypothesize that the subtleties of IR's delivery of attention tokens are consequential for IE's selection of which bits of the story to develop further.
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This excerpt starts more than 2 minutes after the end of the previous one. No input from IR was audible during the intervening 2 minutes.
Click here to hear Excerpt 06.
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IE1: ... uz na tom na
IR1: [uhuh]
IE2: [tom] zavode nebo na ty dilne a tam se melo uz opravovat.
IR2: [uhuh]
IE3: [tam] nejvetsi (xxxxx) a protoze oni nemeli nikoho na prijem, takze misto abych ja spravovala a opravovala tak jsem tak chteli abych zrovna jako protoze jsem se ucila od toho podniku (.) takze abych zrovna teda tam sla do toho na ten vydej a prijem vlastne tech zakazek. [Takze jsem neopravovala]
IR3: [uhuh, tak jste delala] takovou recepcni=
IE4: =no, tak jsem delala (.) tuto praci, takze jsem vlastne z toho opravovani z ty pulrocni praxe jsem vlastne nemela zadnou praxi (.) takze potom i ...
English translation of Excerpt 06:
IE1: ... already in the in
IR1: [uhuh]
IE2: [that] works or in that workshop and there we were already supposed to do repairs.
IR2: [uhuh]
IE3: [there] the greatest (xxxxx) and because they had nobody for reception, so instead of doing mending and repairs so I so they wanted me to go straight there to the reception and despatch of the orders actually. [So I didn't do repairs]
IR3: [uhuh, so you did] a sort of receptionist=
IE4: =yeah, so I did (.) this work, so in fact out of the half-year placement I was getting no practice in repairs (.) so then also...
After a two-minute mute period, IR delivers three "uhuhs" in close succession. I note that IR1 is somewhat oddly placed, in that it seems to come when IE is in mid-flow rather than in a transition-relevance place. This misalignment is corrected by IR2 and IR3, which do come in transition-relevance places. In addition, IR3 follows the "uhuh" with "so you did a sort of receptionist", to which IE4 gives an agreement before resuming her report on early work career. This is the first incidence of many in this interview, where IR inserts an utterance which is neither a question nor a request for clarification nor a substantive comment. It is an upgraded attention token. By using it, IR confirms his "engaged listener" participation and, by putting on display his understanding of what IE is saying, invites IE to confirm that the displayed understanding is right. IR's use of such insertions thus in effect punctuates the proceedings with affirmative exchanges.
This is similar to Mazeland and ten Have's (1996) observation that IRs use "repeats" and "formulations" to elicit affirmative responses from IEs and thus meet the general conversational preference for frequent agreement, although doing professional neutrality requires IRs not to give personal agreement to IEs' opinions. Unlike in Mazeland and ten Have's repeats and formulations, however, the insertions that IR practises in this interview are informal rather than institutional in their style.
Interestingly, in this particular case IE4's agreement is ready - it is latched on to IR3 - but it is somewhat qualified. IE4 does not echo IR3's "receptionist", electing instead, after a pause, "this work". It is likely that "receptionist" was not quite right, but at that moment the precise job title was of less consequence to either participant than an opportunity to accomplish an affirmative exchange. Another point to note is that IE4 gives her affirmation in a colloquial "yeah" ("no"), thus adding an informal conversational element to the proccedings.
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This excerpt starts 23 seconds after the end of the previous one.
Click here to hear Excerpt 07.
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IE1: ... no a po vyuceni jsem (.) jsem tam (.) vlastne pracovala na tom prijmu a vydaji v ty radioopravne a televizni opravne. (.) V ty dobe v tech zhruba asi 18 letech jsem se seznamila (.) s manzelem, tak jsme spolu jako, s budoucim manzelem (.)
IR1: on byl taky opravar?
IE2: ne ne ne, manzel je, byl projektantem projektant vysokyho napeti ...
English translation of Excerpt 07:
IE1: ... well and after apprenticeship I (.) I worked (.) there in fact in the reception and despatch in the radio repair shop and TV repair shop. (.) At that time at about age maybe 18 I got acquainted with (.) my husband, so we together like, with my future husband (.)
IR1: was he a repairer too?
IE2: no no no, my husband is, was a designer designer of high voltage ...
IE1 finishes her account of her apprenticeship and starts a new topic, about meeting her husband. She delivers the key-word in this news - "my husband" ("s manzelem") - after a pause and with a slight upward inflexion, perhaps inviting IR to acknowledge the new topic. IR remains silent, however. IE1 starts to say something like "so we went out together", but aborts it and re-delivers the news key-word, in an extended form - "my future husband" - followed by a pause. Now IR1 acknowledges the new topic with a follow-up question - "was he a repairer too?" - to which IE2 gives a conversational "no no no" and proceeds to formulate a painstakingly precise description of his occupation.
It is worth taking note of the question that IR1 elects here. He could have asked, for example, "how did you meet?". Without speculating about his motives for selecting this rather than that, we can make a couple of observations on the merits of the question that he actually does ask. Firstly, the key-word in "was he a repairer too" refers back to what IE has just talked about, giving the question a conversational rather than officious flavour, despite its closed (inviting a yes/no answer) form. Note the conversational informality of IE2's "no no no".
And secondly, the question shows interest in the new topic of marriage but, instead of inviting a talk about, e.g., the dances and cinemas in which young men and women met each other, it alludes yet again (see the question in Excerpt 01) to a research agenda to which the fact that the IE is now a farm restituent is especially relevant. A question about the husband's occupation is more readily accountable as belonging to a story of how the family became private farmers than a question about dating and courtship would have been.
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This excerpt starts 20 seconds after the end of the previous one. IE has told of how she got married and made her home with her husband "here" (in their present house and the interview venue - see Excerpt 01).
Click here to hear Excerpt 08.
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IE1: ... (.)i kdyz ja jsem tady v zivote bydlet nechtela (.) ja jsem (x[xx])
IR1: [proc ne], vy jste (.)
IE2: ja sem ja pochazim tady z [tohoto domu]
IR2: [tad tady] jste vyrostla
IE3: ano ja jsem tady vyrostla
IR3: a chtela jste nekam pryc=
IE4: ano, ja jsem vzdycky mela predstavu ze budu (.) mit malej bytecek kde budu mit jenom (.) jenom (.) dva tri pokoje, koupelnicku a ze to mne bude uplne stacit a ze budu bydlet ve meste a ne v takovyhle vesnici nekde [na]
IR4: [uhuh]
IE5: konci sveta.
English translation of Excerpt 08:
IE1: ... (.)although never in my life had I wanted to live here (.) I (x[xx])
IR1: [why not], you are (.)
IE2: I am I originate from here from [this house]
IR2: [her here] you grew up
IE3: yes I grew up here
IR3: and you wanted somewhere away=
IE4: yes, I always had the image that I'd have (.) a nice little flat where I'd have just (.) just (.) two three rooms, a little bathroom and that that would do me fine and that I'd live in town and not in this kind of village somewhere [at]
IR4: [uhuh]
IE5: the end of the world.
This is the most intensive IR-IE interchange in the whole interview, with IR coming in four times within less than half a minute. It is arguably also the single most significant one in the whole interview, because it initiates what turns out to be a recurrent motif in the overall narrative. When we analyse IE's talk in the normal manner of qualitative work with life narratives, that is, when we treat the transcript as her text and identify its recurrent motifs, principal themes and overall emplotment, we find that her narrative is characterised by a recurrent two-part, contrastive message of self-change: "I used to be like that, and now I am like this". ("I used to want to live in town, now I live in village"; "I used to be a strict and anxious mother, now I see the importance of allowing children some autonomy"; "we were not agriculturalists, and now we are"; etc.) That actually makes her narrative rather distinctive in the set of 66 interviews that comprised the research project, because the great majority built up the self as very continuous. In this excerpt, we can see the distinctive recurrent message of the narrative proclaimed for the first time. It is proclaimed with IR's active collaboration.
IE1 marks out "although never in my life had I wanted to live here" with a slight upward voice inflexion before a pause, thus inviting a more active participation from IR. IR1 takes up the invitation by asking "why not". It may seem a natural question to ask in the circumstances, but it is worth considering just for a moment something else that he could have said. He could have remarked, for example, "I'm not surprised". Had he done that, he would have marked out not wanting "to live here" as immediately understandable and not at all odd, and he would have been in danger of being heard as making an adverse comment on IE's house or its location. I am raising this counter-factual point to draw attention to this aspect of IR1's actual "why not": it marks out not wanting "to live here" as needing an explanation, as a bit odd. In asking the IE to account for her then-not-wanting, he is certainly steering clear of any danger of being heard as making an adverse comment on her present house and location. He might be even heard as implicitly intimating an approval of it.
But IR1 does not leave it at that. He follows his "why not" with alluding to the interchange right at the beginning of the interview, which has established that IE has been always living in her house (see Excerpt 01). His "you are (.)" is sufficient for IE2 to hear it as the beginning of "you are from here aren't you" and to take up the allusion. IE2 starts her confirmation with an echoing "I am from here" but corrects it to "I originate from here from this house", re-using her phrasing from the opening interchange which is being alluded to here. Before she finishes saying that, IR2 comes in with "her-here you grew up", which IE3 affirms with an echoing phrase. IR3 follows this affirmation with "and you wanted somewhere away", to which IE4 latches on with an extended description of her youthful desires for a cosy little flat in town, delivered with an intonation, emphatic pauses and lexical choices (a lot of diminutives) suggesting that the desires were strong then and deserving of irony now. IR4 acknowledges this account with an "uhuh".
IR thus strengthens his "why not" with what amounts to a powerful rhetorical device, a three-part list: "you are (from here) - you grew up here - and you wanted somewhere away". Moreover, IE supports it with her three-part list: "I originate from this house - I grew up here - and I desired to live in a flat in town instead of here at the end of the world". The choice of "and" rather than "but" at the beginning of the third part in this construction stops just short of proclaiming the third part as being contrary to what one should expect to follow from the first two parts. The IE-IR interchange, however, certainly amplifies IE1's original statement, that she did not want to live in her house when she was young, into something really remarkable, a peculiar biographical fact that needs to be accounted for. And, it accounts for it simply by highlighting the implicit truth that in a biography the protagonist may change. Thus the narrative theme of self-change - "I used to be like that while now I am like this" - was collaboratively set.
The ready way in which IE and IR link their present talk to the interchange they had right at the beginning of the interview (IR1 does not need to finish his statement, IE2 makes a point of repeating her lexical choice from the early interchange) gives further strength to the message emerging from the present interchange. It links it with the beginning and makes it a part of the construction of overall narrative coherence.
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This excerpt starts 16 seconds after the end of the previous one.
Click here to hear Excerpt 09.
IE1: ... ah (.) takze to bylo jenom takovy provizorni takze jsme si zchystali tady kuchynku a tady ten obejvak a tady takovou loznicku (.) zatim jsme nemeli vubec nic (.) no a (.) ze nebudeme mit deti, ze budeme muset mit deti az jako pozdejc, ze budem cestovat a a (..) tak jako to jenomze (..) jenomze (..) deti. (.) prisly aniz jsme hihi [hihi]
IR1: [hihi]
IE2: to jako [chteli]
IR2: [deti prisly] nad plan
IE3: ano prisly nad plan, ale byli jsme jako radi, ne ze bysme nebyli radi. takze (.) takze jsme zustali tady a v roce 73 se nam narodila ...
English translation of Excerpt 09:
IE1: ... andh (.) so that was only a sort of makeshift so we got us a little kitchen ready and here this living room and here such a little bedroom (.) we had got nothing at all yet (.) well and (.) that we won't have children, that we'll have to have children sometime later, that we'll travel and and (..) so on except that (..) except that (..) children. (.) came without us hihi [hihi]
IR1: [hihi]
IE2: so to speak [wanting]
IR2: [children came] above plan
IE3: yes, they came above plan, but we were glad like, not that we were not glad. so (.) so we stayed here and in 1973 (a daughter) was born to us ...
This is the first time laughter occurs in this interview. A shared laughter constitutes a shared stance. It is interesting to note how it is set up here.
IE1 concludes a report about establishing marital home in the house with "(.)we had got nothing at all yet (.)", delivered in a softer voice, and starts a new topic with "well and (.) that we won't have children", where the pause is followed by a louder and more animated voice. Another change that comes after the pause concerns grammar and rhetoric. Three statements are delivered, each starting somewhat colloquially with "that" ("ze"), which marks them as citations of what the protagonists decided at the time: "that we won't have children, that we'll have to have children sometime later, that we'll travel". The use of citation markers creates a distance between narrator and protagonist, while the rhetoric of a three-part list adds emphasis to the report on the protagonists' then-decisions. It plays on the narrative theme of self-change ("I used to be like that, now I am like this") which was set only 20 seconds ago (see Excerpt 08).
This time, however, IE1 sets the then-decisions into a contrast with something else that happened then, marking it with a change of pace and series of pauses: "...travel and and (..) so on except that (..) except that (..) children. (.) came ...". The downward voice inflexion in "children" followed by a pause invites IR to see the humorous contradiction between newly-weds' plans and childrens' anarchic tendency to come to life regardless, even before the punchline "except that children came without us wanting" is actually delivered. IE1 interrupts her punchline by a giggle which IR1 joins.
IR2 follows the giggle by inserting "[children came] above plan", where "above plan" is a standard phrase from communist-era production reports, playing further with the humorous contrast between planning and life. IE3 affirms the insertion with an echoing phrase and, after making sure that the humour is not misinterpreted, gets on with the story.
In the course of introducing the topic of parenthood, IE initiates an interchange with IR, which produces a shared personal stance on the topic. Unsurprisingly, the topic of parenting subsequently came to occupy a large part of the interview - 28 minutes. (Only the combined topic of restituting the farm and getting it going occupied more than that - 43 minutes - but that was thanks to IR asking a lot of follow-up questions on the factual content.)
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The nine excerpts, which between them cover one-half of the opening eight minutes of the interview recording, show IR and IE constantly at work on their mutual orientation and alignment. The prior interview-framing agreement did not pre-set the participants' conduct into a pattern that could be adequately described as a simple division of labour where IE monologically develops her life narrative and IR listens and asks for clarification where necessary. A lot of action takes place which would not be predicted by this a priori model. IE puts her voice modalities and speech rhythms into use to invite IR to upgrade his participation from silent listening. IR uses the IR-prerogative of asking questions to upgrade his participation, to renew co-participant alignment rather than to clarify informational content. IR and IE engage one another in interchanges which affirm the research agenda and punctuate the proceedings with agreements, including quite personal agreements, without explicitly compromising IR's "neutral monitor" stance. IE and IR collaborate to produce both the "institutional-research" and "personal rapport" qualities of the interview.
The excerpts show IE's and IR's joint actions which shape the distribution of narrative contents. When IR does not take up IE's invitation to upgrade his participation from silent listening, IE curtails her account of a stage in her schooling. When IE and IR engage in an interchange that produces a shared personal stance on parenting, the topic of parenting subsequently takes up a lion's share of the overall content. In addition, and most significantly, Excerpt 8 shows IE's and IR's joint involvement in an action which gives the overall narrative its distinctive structuring theme.
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