Drawing implications from Potter & Hepburn

As preeminent voices in the field of discursive psychology and interaction studies, Potter and Hepburn began their careers researching interviews and interactions. It is through this lens that they offer advice and implications to qualitative researchers on the use of open-ended interview data.

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The authors contextualize their argument with 20 years of conversation analytic research on the Q&A format in institutional settings and everyday life. On top of that, researchers are now studying the use of Q&A in the social sciences, turning the "analytic searchlight" on themselves (p. 4).  

Potter and Hepburn want to bring rigor to a form of data collection that has been "too easy, too obvious, and too little studied," and, thus, has been the basis of much poor research (p. 3). They say their goal is to critique the ubiquitous open-ended interview so as to improve it. Considering their backgrounds, can they do this without coming across as theoretically and methodologically imperialist?

To their critics, Potter and Hepburn simply say "...[R]esearchers defending the status quo will need to show that the close dependence of both the form and content of the ‘answer' on the design and delivery of the ‘question' is not of general consequence" (p. 17). Who can argue with that?

A theory-to-practice feedback loop

The chapter is organized into two sections: analyzing interview data and reporting findings from interview data. Personally, I would have preferred more discussion about the design and conduct of interviews themselves, as that is what I'm in the process of doing right now. It seems that as we are interviewing so many procedural and methodological missteps can occur.

I guess it is Potter and Hepburn's belief that the researcher has more oversight over the analysis and reporting stages. We have greater opportunity at these stages to practice reflexivity and exercise conscious control over methodological choices than during the unstructured free-flow of qualitiative interviews. Their point is that theory feeds practice. The more carefully we attend to the challenges in our analysis and presentation of findings, the more thoughtful we will be in our future interview set-ups. Maybe we will reconsider our choice of data generation altogether. (True to their roots, Potter and Hepburn recommend more consideration be given to natural interactions.)

Each section of the chapter addresses four challenges. The first section deals with challenges in reporting and representing data; the second section discusses analytical challenges. As I summarize these, I will note specific implications for my current project.

Challenges and opportunities for reporting interview data

1) Make the interview set-up explicit. Describe how the participants were recruited and the explicit language and categories used to do so. Further, what kind of task, instruction, guidance were the interviewees given? I did not conduct a blind recruitment. I simply sent out a blanket invitation to all the study participants asking them to talk to me about their experience. I have the wording of that email which I can include as an appendix along with the interview protocol that I read verbatim at the outset of each interview.

2) Display the active role of the interviewer. Rather than inserting illustrative quotes from participants only, carefully include extracts that include the entire interactional turn between interviewer and interviewee. This enables readers to see "how the form of the answer may be occasioned by the form of the question" (p. 10). Fair enough. This seems more doable in a dissertation study than in a journal article with space constraints. Potter and Hepburn are building a case for a total departure from how participants' voices are depicted in qualitative studies. The introduction of the playscript format, itself not widely used in research articles, is still inadequate, according to the authors, because it does not capture "delivery of the talk" (p. 10). Are they really suggesting that all qualitative researchers use Jeffersonian transcription?

3) Represent talk in a way that captures action. And there it is: Jeffersonian transcription "allows the identification of a number of potentially consequential interviewer actions" (p. 13). Potter and Hepburn suggest that we give our extracts (not the full transcripts) the Jeffersonian treatment. This is also completely doable in a dissertation study and would likely be appreciated by committee members, so long as an explicit explanation is provided and a key to Jeffersonian notation appears in the appendices. I am currently revising portions of Chapter 3, and I wonder if this isn't something I should consider doing?

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4) Tie analytic observations to specific features of interviews. This suggestion is based on the claim that interview data is under-analyzed. Instead of combining interview data with large chunks of analysis in one paragraph, Potter and Hepburn recommend bolstering the analysis with simple formatting changes, such as representing turns on separate lines and numbering the lines.  Again, not hard to do when one is not constrained by space limitations or word counts, as in a dissertation study. But I wonder how these representational practices would be received by journal editors and article reviewers?

Challenges and opportunities during analysis

5) Flooding. This is the phenomenon of the interviewer's agenda creeping into the interview in benign ways, such as follow-up questions and probs formulated on the fly as well as "acknowledgement tokens" and agreement statements which potentially lead interviewees down a desired path. While these interactional events are natural and cannot necessarily be curtailed, they need to be acknowledged or risk analysis "chasing its own tail" (p. 20). I am not sure what the implications of this might be other than to heighten awareness and reflexivity and to perhaps include interpretive commentary to that effect when including extracts with multiple turns.

6) Footing. Footing refers to the various positions or categories that participants may speak from during an interview. In Extract 3 the interviewer poses a question that the interviewee may answer from a personal or institutional standpoint or some combination thereof. Likewise, the interviewer may be positioned as someone who is personally interested in the question or one who is just asking the question so it can go "on the record," like a disinterested reporter. This is fascinating. At this point in the discussion, it is safe to say that the extract Potter and Hepburn have used extensively throughout this article, the one illustrating a "put together on the spot" question about teachers (p. 19), is really just pretty terrible. It is like the proverbial "How did you feel when _____" questions that TV news reporters ask disaster survivors.  Does the question really bear asking? Potter and Hepburn don't belabor that point; they simply call attention to the lack of interviewer engagement, no "ohs" or "hmm-hmms." To an extent, these conversational elements are "subtle, complex and potentially consequential" (p. 24). When they are missing altogether, it suggests that the interviewer perhaps asked a question for which he or she already knew the answer. To be considered a credible social scientist, I had better ask thoughtful questions I genuinely care about, lest I be compared to a "news anchor."

7) Stake and interest. Unlike corporate-sponsored focus group surveys, qualitative research is typically conducted by someone who feels passionately about the topic, and interviewees are recruited because they ostensibly have an interest in the topic too. It is a wise analytic move to pay attention to how interviewer and interviewee manage their stake in the discussion. It seems that stake and interest are the the next logical progression from footing. If I openly acknowledge my interest in the topic, listen attentively, and engage with my participants, I must be reflexive about the consequences of these actions.

8) Cognitivism and individualism. Potter and Hepburn call qualitative researchers to task -- particularly constructivists -- for the ironic "privileging of conceptual mediation over action and the treatment of cognitive language as referential" (p. 28). Qualitative researchers put their interviewees in an impossible "epistemic position" to speak their minds and the minds of others, as if that kind of knowledge can be objectively reported and stated without performing a "range of ambitious cognitive judgments and feats of memory and analysis" (p. 29). Cognitive language (reminding me of the "residue" of positivism from Piantanida and Garman's book) creeps into our interactions, carrying with it the assumption that somehow people have "immediate and privileged access to their own opinions and attitudes" (p. 30). A discourse or conversation analysis approach would obviously be Potter's and Hepburn's desired route to mediate this challenge, but that isn't the only way. I am interested in the analytical tools of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, which enable the researcher to explore "agentive dimensions" (emotions, identity, motivation) (Roth, 2009, p. 53). In one such study, Roth and colleagues (2004) drew from case study data, including transcripts, to theorize identity formation as predicated upon actions and outcomes.The authors contended that identity is not stable and is the outcome of participation in social activity. The key here is that interview data was not privileged over other forms (videotapes, journal reflections, field notes, and emails), a methodological move that Potter and Hepburn would endorse.

References

Potter, J., & Hepburn, A. (in press). Eight challenges for interview researchers. In J. F. Gubrium, & J. A. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research (2nd ed.). London: Sage Publications.

Roth, W.-M. (2009). On the inclusion of emotions, identity, and ethico-moral dimensions of actions. In A. Sannino, H. Daniels, & K. D. Gutierrez (Eds.), Learning and expanding with activity theory (pp. 53–71). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roth, W.-M. (2004). Activity theory and education: An introduction. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 11(1), 1–8. doi:10.1207/s15327884mca1101_1

Drawing implications from Potter & Hepburn