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Qualitative Inquiry
DOI: 10.1177/1077800409343063
2009; 15; 1498 originally published online Aug 19, 2009;Qualitative Inquiry
Lene Tanggaard
of Social Life and Personal Narratives
The Research Interview as a Dialogical Context for the Production
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1498
The Research Interview as
a Dialogical Context for the
Production of Social Life
and Personal Narratives
Lene Tanggaard
Aalborg University, Denmark
The aim of the present article is to consider the research interview as a dialogical
context for the production of social life and personal narratives. It is emphasized
that interviews are inevitable, dialogical social events based on repertoires
of socially and culturally embedded and constantly changing words and discourses.
Rather than viewing the interview as a setting for unfolding an inner
and subjective lifestory uninfluenced by the interview setting, it is suggested
that the interview is better described as a setting in which dissenting opinion,
diverse discourses, and personal narratives are produced through the social,
dialogical context of the interview. In this sense, one major objective of qualitative
research interviewing is to identify general discursive repertoires in
speaking within particular social settings and to fuel public dialogue about
research themes beyond the specific interview setting.
Keywords: dialogue; Bahktin; polyphonic research interviewing
The aim of the present article is to extend the framework of research interviewing
that was recently presented by Kvale and Brinkmann. Within their
agenda, the purpose of research interviewing is stated as follows: "The purpose
of the qualitative research interview discussed here is to understand themes of
the daily world from the subject's own perspective" (Kvale & Brinkmann,
2008, p. 24). Kvale and Brinkmann arrive at this statement through inspiration
from Giorgi's (1975) phenomenological interview analysis that focused on
meaning structures in the subject's psychological lifeworlds. However, later in
the text, Kvale and Brinkmann also stress that discourses voiced in an interview
Author's Note: I would like to thank Svend Brinkmann for comments to the manuscript in an
early stage. In addition, the manuscript has greatly benefited from comments from Norman
Denzin, Brian Bloch and anonymous reviewers. The remaining flaws and unclarities are
entirely the author's own responsibility. Please address correspondence to Lene Tanggaard,
Kroghstraede 3, Aalborg East 9220, Denmark; e­mail: Lenet@hum.aau.dk.
Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 15 Number 9
November 2009 1498­1515
 2009 SAGE Publications
10.1177/1077800409343063
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Tanggaard / The Research Interview as a Dialogical Context 1499
need to be approached in their own right and not as an expression of the essence
of psychological meaning structures hidden behind language: "Discourses are
used to create, maintain and destroy social bonds" (p. 226). Language "does
something" and because it is a means of data production in an interview, this is
a significant issue. Accordingly, the viewpoint to be emphasized in the present
context is that interviewing constitutes a specific setting for the dialogical production
of personal narratives and social life. Within such a perspective, interviewing
should not be seen as a channel for tapping the subject's own
viewpoint. The central analytical unit is not a bounded and static self but rather
the diverse discursive repertories spoken by persons within particular social
settings; that is, interviewing provides a context for revealing how language
"makes" people, produces and changes social life.
To help clarify the above statements, I draw on the Russian philosopher
Bahktin (1981, 2003), who wrote about the character of dialogues in
everyday life, as produced against the background of a cultural repertoire
of words and discourses. To further differentiate this point, the article
draws on empirical interview material from the author's own research,
which illustrates how interview dialogues can be seen as social activities
taking place through touching on dissenting opinion and discourses within
the particular field of research. In the case presented in this article, the
theme of the interview and the overall research project was psychologists'
work practices with children, in which different discourses about sound
psychological work seem to both converge and diverge. As such, a thoroughly
dialogical interview can give voice to dissenting discourses within
the specific interview settings that are embedded within and reflect broader
diversity within institutional talk and practices.
Why Bahktin and Interviewing?
Bahktin did not concern himself with research methods, and his field of
study was about the novel as a modern literary genre (Bahktin, 1981, 2003).
It may, therefore, seem odd to deal with his work in relation to research
interview processes. Nevertheless, the essential benefit of working with
Bahktin is that he enables us to determine quite precisely that no dialogue
in a research interview is conducted only on the basis of our own exclusively
subjective words or just one general language. A research interview
will inevitably be polyphonic--replete with the use of many voices, words,
and discourses that structure the conversation.
Likewise, discursive social psychologists have argued that structured discursive
resources or repertories underlie and sustain social interaction (Potter,
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1500 Qualitative Inquiry
2003; Potter & Hepburn, 2005; Wetherell & Potter, 1992; Wiggins & Potter,
2008). Parker defines `discourse'as "the organization of language into certain
kinds of social bonds" (p. 88). A variety of discourses often stand out when
examining interview transcripts or listening to interview talks. The emphasis
among qualitative researchers on discourse analysis is part of the linguistic
turn in the social sciences and humanities that emphasizes the role of language
in the construction of social reality. Some texts about discourse analysis
have also been inspired explicitly by the work of Bahktin (Parker, 2005).
However, few advocate a `Bahktian' approach to interviewing.
The aim of the present article is not to consider discourse analysis per
se, but to examine the implications of a Bahktian' approach in relation to
conducting research interviews. With reference to Bahktin, it is proposed
that interviewing is viewed as a social setting for the proliferation of polyphonic
dialogues, in which there are many voices and discourses that cross
each other simultaneously to produce knowledge about personal narratives
and social life. Arguments along this line have been presented in previous
articles, in which I have regarded the interview basically as a setting for the
negotiation of meaning in social conversation (Tanggaard, 2007, 2008).
Other proponents of a similar perspective are Fontana and Frey (2005),
Fontana and Prokos (2007), and Holstein and Gubrium (2003). Kvale
(2006) has also argued that we need to advance our ideas about what it
means to engage in dialogue.
Within the present context, interview dialogues are seen as productive
and fundamental to what can be and is said in an interview. Accordingly,
researchers do not conduct interviews to determine whether the meaning
expressed in an interview actually corresponds to events that have really
occurred. As recently argued by Polkinghorne (2007), the `truth' sought by
many interview researchers are `narrative truths' and not `historical' truths:
"Storied texts serve as evidence for personal meaning, not for the actual
occurrence of the events reported in the stories" (p. 479). To argue further
along the lines of Bahktin, personal meaning is dialogical and performed in a
borderline area between oneself and others. "Personal meaning" is not something
purely private and subjective, nor is it exclusively public and "true." To
tell our stories in an interview, we have to perform in a borderline area:
Language . . . lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word
of language is half someone else's. It becomes & apos; one's own & apos;
only when the speaker populates it with his [sic] own intention, his own
accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and
expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does
not exist in a neutral and impersonal language . . . , but rather it exists in
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Tanggaard / The Research Interview as a Dialogical Context 1501
other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's
intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own
(Bahktin, 1981, p. 294)
While my speaking creates the illusion of unity and a consistent train of
communication, I am, in fact, says Bahktin, constantly expressing a plenitude
of meanings, some intended, others less so or not at all. There is no
one stable and true story to be told about participants in an interview study.
One can clearly identify general themes or discursive repertories across and
within different kinds of interviews within a particular social setting, but
each participant can talk with different voices because narratives are dialogical
and multivoiced. Gilbert and Mulkay (1984, p. 2) argued that not
only do different actors tell different stories in each interview but over an
entire interview it is often exceedingly difficult to reconstruct or summarize
the views of one participant because each actor has many different voices
crossing, delimiting, or refusing to interact with one another.
An Example
When conceiving of a dialogue as an active production of social `facts'
and personal narratives, the emphasis of the interview researchers is on how
speakers (both interviewees and interviewer) are positioned in social networks
of power that grant different rights and obligations to speakers. The
following example shows one instance of such an emphasis. The example is
taken from one interview (out of 15) conducted as part of a research project
on "Changing Practices in Educational Psychological Practice" (CPEPP) in
Denmark by the present author in collaboration with Claus Elmholdt. The
aim of this public institution of educational psychological service in
Denmark is to ensure the growth and well­being of children (0­18 years) in
school and day care centers. Over time, policy maker perceptions of the role
and activities of the psychologist in educational services have changed.
Traditionally, the psychologist focused on individual testing, assessment,
and visitation with respect to special pedagogical arrangements (Baltzer &
Tetler, 2003). However, an educational service institutionalizing individual
testing, assessment, and visitation is increasingly identified as a problem
interfering with the prevailing political agenda of developing an inclusive
"school for all." Recently, consultative approaches have been introduced
into educational psychological practice, aiming at systemic and preventive
measures to resolve problems associated with children in day care and
school. This current organizational change is forcing many psychologists to
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1502 Qualitative Inquiry
change their earlier and often dominant work modes to those of psychological
work focused on individual testing and assessment. It is a challenge
to learn new approaches to their job, and psychologists face new dilemmas.
By focusing on trajectories of learning, we have, in earlier studies, contributed
to understanding how psychologists manage to combine, refuse, and/or
create a meaningful stance toward politically motivated pressure upon them
to change existing work modes--in this respect to reduce the number of
assessment tasks (Tanggaard & Elmholdt, 2007). The interview presented
below shows how the practice of CPEPP is a conflict­ridden process with
many different and colliding discourses about `proper' psychological work.
The following interview sequence is from a 35­page interview transcript
with one psychologist. The dialogue takes place on pages 14 and 15 of the
interview transcript in which the interviewer and interviewee attempt to
reach an understanding of the work perspective of the psychologist. They
are talking about the basic theoretical justification of the psychologist's
work and how this informs the actual work practice:
IE (Interviewee): Yes, but I am more a social constructivist in my understanding
. . .
I (Interviewer): . . . you are more social constructivist. Does that mean you
would say that children's problems are socially constituted?
IE: Well, yes, but again, that is not really true. And it is also not what I am saying.
I am just saying that it might be the case, you know. If I do a psychological
test, then something will eventually show up, there will be something
with this child. But the question is, What should push me to thrash this child
through a test? It will need to have a purpose. The problems might be minimized
by working with the teachers or caretakers instead of testing the child.
This is actually often the case right?. . . . because the other kind of thinking,
to me it becomes a bit like, either there is a problem with the child or there
is no problem, and this is not how the world actually is. If a child is tested
and nothing shows up, it's just because the child is not tested accurately.
There is always something, we are all so different. So it's not about being
sick or healthy. And it is so dependent on adults' understanding. They need
to see that the child is not a devil. "She is lying most of the time." This is how
I often hear grown­ups talking about children, right? You know, they need to
understand that this boy might have some difficulties coping with an openspace
educational design or whatever, everybody is unruly, right? If we rearrange
the classroom, well then he might calm down, and there is no need to
test him. Did you catch any of this?
A lot of things are happening in the above interview sequence. At the
beginning, there is a brief interchange between the interviewer and the
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Tanggaard / The Research Interview as a Dialogical Context 1503
interviewee in which the psychologist diverges from the interpretation
voiced by the interviewer and regards children's problems as socially constituted.
A negotiation of meaning occurs in order to arrive at a clearer
description of the psychologist's approach that emphasizes that some kinds
of problems should be seen as socially constituted. The psychologist furthermore
queries the traditional testing approach because, in her perspective,
this will always create problems. The materialization of the discourse of
testing achieves something because it categorizes children as being either
with or without problems. What is furthermore evident from the above quote
is that the psychologist paraphrases many different voices in relation to children.
Examples of adult interpretations of children's behavior are rephrased,
and the interviewee asks imaginary questions intended to illustrate particular
perspectives. The dialogue is polyphonic, replete with the use of many different
voices that reveal the diverse ideas of children's problems.
A possible criticism of the above interpretation is that we cannot be sure
that the psychologist's interpretations are actually true? Does she provide
an accurate description of her actual work practices, and do adults really
insinuate that children are lying? In a dialogical interview context and later
in the analysis of the interview material, the researcher generally does not
consider these kinds of questions. Rather, the above sequence will be seen
as a perfect illustration of the contradictions and dissenting discourses
within the social field of psychologists working with children. Also, the
above issue can be regarded as part of a narrative about how one can be a
psychologist and simultaneously confront the dominant test regime in
much psychological work with children.
Considering the above sequence, it would be a mistake to regard the
subject as the "sole agent" of the story. In the dialogical sense of a Bahktian
approach, the stories and utterances are polyphonic. Accounts given by the
interviewee are seen as embedded in a context, within the specific social
relationship of the interview and set against a particular cultural background.
In the above situation, this cultural background is the change
occurring in educational psychological counseling in Denmark. The interviewee
is reworking elements of certain cultural narratives about children,
parents, and psychological treatment to produce something that captures
their own experience. However, there is not necessarily consistency within
one story. The psychologist in the above interview talks about the conflict
inherent in working with psychological tests because she often identifies
problems as belonging to individuals, whereas they may also originate in
the social organization of schools. Later in the interview, the interviewee
denies facing any dilemmas, particularly in her job:
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1504 Qualitative Inquiry
I (Interviewer): What do you experience as the greatest dilemmas in the job?
(pause)
IE (Interviewee): . . . Well, actually, I cannot think of any dilemmas right now,
in fact, I don't think, I face any dilemmas. Or yes, perhaps there are dilemmas,
I think . . .
I: What you were talking about before, could one say . . .
IE: Yes, of course, but I have already told it right! But we are quite independent;
I have found a job where I am able to work my own way. But it would be
nice if things were more consistent, if we agreed a bit more about our ways
of working.
Indeed, the psychologist faces dilemmas, but they are not necessarily
perceived as being individual. She is able to work as she prefers, but the
institution as such might be seen as a social setting with diverse interpretations
of what good psychological work entails. As such, the interview
enables us to learn about interpretative resources within the institution of
psychologists who work with children in day care centers and schools as
such, and not just about subjective viewpoints.
However, we need not look for a reality behind the words or try to
ensure a correspondence between words and reality--is what the interviewee
tells us really a true reflection of the institution in which she is
working? This is not an issue, even if we acknowledge that storied experiences
are constructed around a core of `facts' or life events. The real text to
be analyzed afterwards is the talk fashioned within the social and creative
interaction of the interview setting, and we pay attention to how the interviewee
uses particular stories to make sense of things that happened to
them, and how they relate events in a certain order.
In the particular example above, the interviewee says something about
the feelings, experiences, and attitudes toward herself as a psychologist,
but the word psychologist and the specific cultural narratives of psychological
work convey substantial cultural, social, and historical meanings
that emerge as part of the conversation. When spoken, in addition to
referring to memories, experiences, and attitudes toward particular
instances of being a psychologist, the story may also touch upon specific
cultural "plots" about what constitutes a "good" psychologist. Each personal
narrative produced as part of a research interview needs to be seen
as located within the wider structures of discourse and power, which
frame storytelling in the context of what is considered important in life
within a specific culture. Our stories are closely intertwined with those of
others and must, within the framework proposed in this article, be analyzed
as such.
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Tanggaard / The Research Interview as a Dialogical Context 1505
Dissenting Discourses in Interviewing
As a consequence of the above and in order to view interviewing as a
social creation of meaning and personal narratives, it is necessary to
acknowledge the possible existence of conflicts, opposition, and struggle
between the different discourses voiced in the interview. According to
Bahktin, a living language comprises a temporally parallel combination of
different social languages, each attached to specific ideologies and perspectives.
Examples of these social languages include the professional jargon of
psychologists and teachers or of lawyers, teenage peer groups or the language
of political campaigns. The voice of one group may be authoritative
and hegemonic, suppressing other voices, but in any society, there are
counterhegemonic voices that may weaken and subvert the more authoritative
ones (Bahktin, 1981, p. 240). For Bahktin, therefore, language is
"heteroglossic," composed of a combination of social languages, some of
which are engaged in opposition and struggle (Bahktin, 1981, p. 294). In an
interview setting, we can explore these social languages and their potential
opposition and struggle. In other words, interviewees can engage in discourses
so as to demonstrate their disagreement with particular discourses
about their own situation. Another example might clarify the point. This
example is from the same interview as the one discussed earlier and concerns
the psychologist's memories of her own job recruitment.
IE (Interviewee): And I do remember, I had to be approved by the psychiatrist
and the psychologist in charge, and I remember how she said, "Well, yes, she
is not trained as a clinical psychologist, she is a school psychologist and normally,
we don't employ such people because their education is not nearly as good
as that of the clinical psychologists." I sat here, I felt like strangling her.
I (Interviewer): Really?
IE: Yes, I needed them to approve me, so I could not say anything. I will never
forgive her, I can still feel it. Because, I really felt put down, right? Because
I do know many clinical psychologists who are fucked up, right? Who haven't
gotten much out of their education.
In the above dialogue, the psychologist is telling a story of the approval
process she encountered in her first job interview. In Denmark, it has been
traditional to educate former school teachers as school psychologists within
educational university settings, while the clinical psychologists have had their
own education at other universities. Conventionally, there have been many
conflicts concerning who were the "real" or best psychologists. The school
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1506 Qualitative Inquiry
psychologists had higher wages because of their position within the strong
teacher union in Denmark, while the clinical psychologists claimed a superior
training and sophistication because they studied psychology exclusively. The
above interview sequence clearly demonstrates this general conflict concerning
dissenting discourses about which education provides the best background
for psychological work with children. Evidently, the psychologist felt pressured
by having to be approved by higher ranking professionals in this social
field (the psychiatrist and the psychologist in command). We do not know
whether this sequence of the interview is an accurate picture of what happened
in the particular situation, but it clearly demonstrates the more general
conflict between psychologists with different educational backgrounds. We
witness how discourses about "proper" psychological work "cross swords"
within this social field and lead to dispute, anger, and social conflict.
Thus, the above sequence from the interview transcript shows how language
is heteroglot: It can give voice to the coexistence of socioideological
contradictions, as in the example of the education of psychologists and
within the different psychological schools and communities. In the research
interview, these "languages" of heteroglossia intersect with one another in
a variety of ways. Discourses evoked by the interviewee or the interviewer
may belong to particular communities or groups and they may stand in
opposition to official or dominant political discourses--this is heteroglossia.
Another and related example of heteroglossia is given in Tanggaard
(2007), which contains an analysis of the difference between the researcher's
"obsession" with learning and the apprentices'refusal to talk about their
own lives and education in terms of the learning discourse. In this case, the
negotiation of meaning that took place when these different discourses
"meet" in the interview was productive because it allowed for opposition to
the learning discourse voiced by the apprentices.
As such, individual expressions do not represent one general language,
but everyday speech is rather a subject for the transmission and mediation
of past, present, and sometimes conflicting discourses that are given an
embodied and social form in an interview. Furthermore, as argued by
Bahktin, the degree of dialogical influence on what is said in a specific
context is substantial because entering a speech context frames any given
utterance:
In order to assess and divine the real meaning of other's words in everyday
life, the following are surely of decisive significance: who precisely is speaking,
and under what concrete circumstances?. . . . and the entire speaking situation
is very important: who is present during it, with what expression or
mimicry is it uttered, with what shades of intonation? (Bahktin, 1981, p. 341)
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Tanggaard / The Research Interview as a Dialogical Context 1507
In each and every interviewing context, people must, therefore, be seen
as actors trying to convey meanings as precisely as they can within the
available, socially embedded discursive repertories. In order to arrive at the
"true" meaning of what is said, we must pay attention to the speech frames
of the situation; to who exactly is present; and to what is said and with what
kind of expression, mimicry, and shades of intonation? In the interview
situation discussed earlier and considered in the present context, the interviewee's
statements might have a different implication in a different situation
corresponding to which the consequences of criticizing her colleagues
may also vary. More important, with Bahktin in mind, what is said is not
the clear expression of some inner state of the subject, but rather a discursively
situated account of a personal narrative, which might induce conflicting
discourses about particular phenomena. Each utterance is both the
subject and the result of social and cultural discourses that can be identified
through careful analysis.
Again with Bahktin in mind, one could, therefore, state more precisely
that dialogues in interviews are heteroglot. As argued recently by Brinkman
and Kvale (2005), Kvale (2006), and Kvale and Brinkmann (2008), an
interview dialogue is not necessarily free of dominance and manipulation.
As interviewers, we need to be aware of this possibility, rather than regarding
interviews as always constituting a progressive and harmonious
exchange of meanings and experiences in which the hidden voices of the
interviewee are brought into the public sphere. In the context of Bahktin, it
is possible to identify the heteroglot and polyphonic character of dialogues.
Surely, an interview often displays both centrifugal and centripetal forces--
and the conflict between different discourses. As argued elsewhere
(Tanggaard, 2008), this should not be seen as bias, but rather as a productive
condition for coming to know more about the social life within particular
communities and the personal narratives of interview participants.
Suggestions for the Research Interview
Can the above points from the Bahktian context and the examples from a
particular interview project suggest ways of approaching the conduct of
interview practices and analysis of interview text? Within the field of psychology,
for example, the linguistic turn and discourse analysis often evolve
into a version of conversation analysis (CA) using, for example, Jefferson's
transcription system (Potter & Hepburn, 2005). In this sense, the researcher
makes a careful moment­to­moment analysis of linguistic interaction, which
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1508 Qualitative Inquiry
may entail a complicated technical process.According to Parker (2005, p. 91),
this gives the analysis a rigorous appearance, but the cost may be high because
it can turn into "textual empiricism" in which the researcher can talk only
about what can be seen in the text. The analyst may overlook aspects of power
that are not talked about more directly in the text. In the present context, it is
acknowledged that the analysis may benefit from specific transcription systems,
but I suggest a more overall discursive awareness in conducting and
analyzing the interviews below. Table 1 contains some fundamental concepts
and ideas for such an interview practice and analysis.
The Aim of Qualitative Interviewing, When
Considered as a Social Context for Personal Narratives
As emphasized in the Table 1 above, the aim is not to capture participant
intentions, meanings, or experiences, seen as a verbal expression of the inner
Table 1
Interviewing for Personal Narratives:
Suggestions for the Interview and Analysis
* Make clear why you have chosen this particular topic and what stakes you have in
it--what theoretical resources might be useful?
* Look out for the multivoicedness of language, instead of searching for an underlying
psychological or sociological essence, factor, or force. Stick to the narrative as built from
cultural elements and given an idiosyncratic twist.
* Carefully describe the social interaction in the interview. Who is present? Be aware of the
flow of the conversation, the timing of questions and answers, possible tensions, and
nature and timing of pauses.
* If dissenting opinions or opposing discourses are voiced, describe in sufficient detail. Be
careful to attend to unexpected and unusual participant utterances.
* Remember that language not only describes the world, it does things! You need to focus on
the way a narrative is told as a performance. We cannot reveal how it really was. Avoid
intrusion into painful, private material. You cannot decode the story to discover what they
really thought about it, or, worse, what underlying psychological processes would explain it.
* What social origin and effect do the discourses in the interview have, for example, how
are the interviewees talking about themselves, what kinds of words do they use for this
description, is it a powerful discourse, do they voice counter discourses?
* What is the story about, what does the interviewee aim to say?
* What social bonds or conflicts may be created and spoken in the interview, how are the
spoken words linked to and/or integrated into discourses, and how are those discourses
linked to each other?
* How does the text conform to or challenge patterns of power?
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Tanggaard / The Research Interview as a Dialogical Context 1509
self or soul, with the research interview being seen as a context for the production
of personal narratives and social life. Rather, the utterances in an interview
situation are regarded as discursively created phenomena of cultural,
social, and material origin in already existing words and discourses. As may
therefore already be evident, the present article does not accept the notion of
a radical distinction between subjective and objective knowledge. However,
in a traditional view on research, researchers frequently have to choose
between a "humanistic," subject­centered approach aiming at capturing participants'
indigenous meanings and experiences, and a "hard," statistical
approach describing concrete facts or broader societal, structural processes.
However, with interviewing regarded as a shared, dialogical affair,
revealing the conflicts embedded in social life, there is no inherent dichotomy
between subjective meanings and objective reality. It is only possible
for the interviewee to produce meanings when both one's own and others'
discourses and words are engaged. The meanings produced about particular
things or events by the interview participants may be seen as subjective
and personal because they are produced by one or more individuals.
However, from the dialogical viewpoint presented here, the meanings are
not subjective ones expressed in a general and neutral language. They are
the local and personal manifestation of socially embedded discourses
crossing and touching each other within heteroglot dialogues. The negotiation
of meanings and the particular constellation of relationship between
interviewer and interviewee are of paramount importance for the meanings
produced in a qualitative research interview.
When the researcher considers the social production of meaning in dialogues,
it is important to bear in mind that in a specific context, words can
have different meanings, depending on who is talking and on the particular
communication situation. In the Bahktin sense, words are seen as having
both a social and a personal and historical or temporal dimension. Each word
may contain different meanings, and there are complex relationships between
current, previous, and future utterances. As elegantly explained by Bahktin,
"Every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound
influence of the answering word that it anticipates" (Bahktin, 1981, p. 280).
The anticipated answer or question from an interviewer constitutes the horizon
of speaking for both parties in the communication process.
In Bahktin's view of communication, there is accordingly, not one, but
several centers of communication and utterances that cannot be conceived
of as a systematic manifestation that is independent of context. Within this
scenario, there is no sovereign ego capable of sending messages to another,
but each party in a conversation appropriates and coproduces a specific mix
of discourses that are capable of effectively conveying their own intentions.
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1510 Qualitative Inquiry
Words and discourse are socially charged; dialogically engaged with past,
present, and future audiences; and imbued with by the intentions of the
unique speaker (Bahktin, 1981, p. 293).
Within this perspective, interviewing is a context for creating polyphonic,
multivoiced knowledge about personal narratives and social life. It is not, as
some researchers suggest is the case with so called multivoice interviewing,
merely a matter of representing the knowledge from an interview, such that
the voices of the respondents are recorded with minimal influence from the
researcher (Fontana & Prokos, 2007). All types of talk are coproduced. Even
an interviewer who tries to ask relatively few questions is part of a coproduction
of meaning when setting up an interview or undertaking an informal
conversation as part of fieldwork studies. It is possible that interviews in
general give us access to a coproduction of personal narratives within social
conversation. Even when the interviewee talks for several minutes without
being interrupted by the interviewer, he or she speaks by vocally producing
socially and historically shaped words. Through the seemingly individual
account of the interviewee, we are most likely exploring a variety of discourses
coproduced by the speakers and made available through common
and sometimes diverse and variant social language repertories.
The present article is based on the premise that, given a local form in the
interview setting, the knowledge produced in an interview reflects collective
and sociocultural discourses. The discourses voiced in an interview
situation mediate and/or influence both subjective and broader sociocultural
experiences; that is, someone owned or used the words before I
uttered them. As argued below, this is also the reason why an interview
study may trigger dialogues in extrainterview settings about how to interpret
and understand a particular phenomenon. Within this perspective, the
main aim of qualitative research interviewing surely is also to fuel dialogues
beyond the specific context of the interview setting.
On the basis of relatively few interviews, researchers may manage to
identify central aspects of typical variations in social discourses about particular
phenomena. My claim is that this is possible because interview
dialogues are not merely local. There are many authors and voices present
because an interview is basically a multivoice scenario. Of course, it is the
individual who speaks to another person, but we ourselves have invented
few, if any, of the words we use. There are other authors and writers. This
point has also been made by MacIntyre (1985):
A conversation is a dramatic work, even if a very short one, in which the
participants are not only actors, but also the joint authors, working out in
agreement or disagreement the mode of their production. (p. 19)
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Tanggaard / The Research Interview as a Dialogical Context 1511
If interviews are seen as a form of joint production, the result should be
considered as a creation of texts. Furthermore, what happens to the interview
when it is analyzed by the researcher and when the results are read by
others should also be seen as part of the production. Readers may identify
with the stories; they may learn from them or they may find them irrelevant.
Pragmatist, constructionist, and discursive approaches conceive of social
knowledge as socially and historically contextualized modes of understanding
and acting in the social world (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008). My point is
that the general value of conducting an interview is that we may, through
words and discourses, explore our socially and historically contextualized
modes of understanding and acting and also identity or encounter the possible
conflicts between different types of acting and understanding. According
to Foucault (1972), one criterion for the existence of a "discourse" is
that it be used in a variety of contexts and, therefore, can be applied (potentially)
to a variety of themes. If the analysis of interviews can be extended,
by making explicit comparisons between discourses in different settings or
contexts of discussion, the research does have a general value.
If `generalization' can refer to what may inspire us and tell us how a phenomenon
could be interpreted, why not argue that the social conversation
produced in qualitative research interviewing can do exactly this? Indeed,
qualitative studies can open up potential for new kinds of dialogues, both
within the context of research and in public life.An interview study may help
us understand how a phenomenon or particular life situation can be discussed,
analyzed, and interpreted by the interview participants. We may get
to know the discourses present in particular social communities and inquire
into the possible conflicts between them; that is, we may explore variation
and diversity in personal narratives produced through social discourses.
In summary, the present article underlines that, when conducting interviews,
we may explore the variation in discourses employed by interviewees
when they tell their stories. This could explain why people often
respond to stories conveyed through interview­studies, "Hey, I know that
feeling" or "This is strange, I have never thought that way before." When
reading the results of a particular study, we frequently compare ourselves
with the cases described and look for similarities and differences between
our own story and those of others. We can do this only against the background
of knowing the words, or of having experiences with the same
`plot,' either from ourselves or from the stories of others. While an interview
study does not reveal how many people live, think, and function the
same way across different settings, they are surely often the basis for perceiving
or interpreting a particular phenomenon. Occasionally, we identify
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1512 Qualitative Inquiry
with the reading and may be inspired to search for something new in our
lives. In this way, dialogue within the interview setting enables us additionally
to develop dialogues in the extrainterview "reality."
Hammersley (2008) recently argued that an emphasis on the socially constructed
meanings in interviews and the resulting radical critique of interviews
as windows into the minds of informants "is unconvincing" (p. 98).
Hammersley points out that the use of interviews as a window to the head
of informants or as representation of their life outside the interview context
is still a legitimate aim of qualitative interviews. We only have to "think
more carefully about how we use data from this source" (p. 98). However,
what seems to be lacking in Hammersley's critique is the notion that a discursive
approach to the conduct of interviewing does not necessarily imply
that the interview locks itself into its own context and can only be a study
of behavior in interviews. Drawing inferences from interviews to other
situations can still be an issue. For example, discourses voiced in one interview
might, in some sense, be shared by other individuals or groups than
the ones participating in the interview. However, discourses cannot, as
seems to be implied by Hammersley, constitute witness information about
a reality beyond language.
Where to Go Now?
In the perspective of this article, the emphasis on knowledge and meaning,
seen as produced through social discourses both within and beyond the
interview setting, does not rule out the use of research interviews. On the
contrary, one way forward would be to encourage qualitative research interviewers
to pay more attention to the futility of exploring discourses voiced
in an interview. Interview researchers might, in this way, be enabled to explore
and also sometimes even challenge the discourses voiced by participants.
What we might also challenge is the idea that interviews can reveal one coherent
narrative about the self of the interviewee. Voices in an interview may
cross, fuel, or constrain one another, and interviews may produce many voices
that do not necessarily connect. Furthermore, interviews enable us to learn
about the interpretative resources within a particular institution and not just
about subjective viewpoints. In this way, research interviews can become part
of public discussion and debate. The goal of interviewing should, therefore,
not be to arrive at "fixed knowledge" of the self or the world once and for all
but to help human beings improve the quality of their conversational reality
and to debate the goals and values that are important in their lives.
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Tanggaard / The Research Interview as a Dialogical Context 1513
Conclusion
The present article was inspired by Bahktin, and the objective was to
explore what it means to engage in a dialogue in an interview setting. It
was argued that dialogues are heteroglot and polyphonic because they are
socially embedded, and they contain many, and sometimes opposing, voices
and discourses.
When conducting research interviews, it is possible for the researcher to
learn from the negotiation between different voices and discourses produced
or voiced in a particular interview setting. As an example of this, interview
sequences from an interview with a psychologist were analyzed.
Accordingly, the conclusion is that there are many authors and voices
in an interview, which is basically a multivoice scenario, constituting a
context for the production of personal narratives. As such, this conception
of dialogues "refuses" to provide clear­cut distinctions between what is
subjective, as opposed to objective, and what is specific, as opposed to
general. As argued, a discursive approach conceives of social knowledge
as socially and historically contextualized modes of understanding and
acting in the social world. The interviewer and the interviewee together
create the stories through their dialogue, and language in itself is dialogical
and can refer to a multiplicity of voices and discourses, which are
organized into social bonds. The interviewer needs an awareness of the
fact that interviewee descriptions and words are not necessarily one and
the same thing and may in fact be quite different. For example, it makes a
difference whether a psychologist talks about herself as a clinical or a
school psychologist because these alternative scenarios create divergent
speaking positions.
In summary, the present article underlines that, when conducting interviews,
we may explore the variation in discourses employed by interview
participants so as to produce their personal narratives. My point is that the
general value of conducting an interview is precisely that we may explore,
through words and discourses, peoples' socially and historically embedded
modes of understanding and acting and also the possible "conflicts" between
different types of acting and understanding. Interviewing presents a good
case for revealing how language "makes" people and produces social life
and for opening up public discussions. An interview study should not, perhaps,
be seen as particularly well suited for obtaining access to subjective
experiences but rather as a research mode that is objectively attuned to
investigating and exploring the discourses and narratives through which
people live their everyday lives.
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1514 Qualitative Inquiry
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Lene Tanggaard is a professor of educational psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark.
Her recent publications include Tanggaard, L. (2007). "The Research Interview as Discourses
Crossing Swords--The Researcher and Apprentice at Crossing Roads" (Qualitative Inquiry,
13, 160­173); and Tanggaard, L. & Elmholdt, C. (2007). "Learning Trajectories Among
Educational Psychologists" (Studies in Continuing Education, 29, 331­350); and Tanggaard,
L. (2007). "Boundary Crossing Between School and Work" (Journal of Education and Work,
20, 453­466). See also http://www.kommunikation.aau.dk/ansatte/lenet/index.html
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