Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

word – or rather with a certain meaning of a word – jeopardises reliability in interviews. Fur-
thermore, not only is interviewing dependant on familiarity on the part of the informant, this
familiarity is unexplicated, taken for granted, though as we have seen, it may not be present.
Standardisation of interviews then rests on our assumption that the informant (and inter-
viewer) during the interview were performing actions and using words in a familiar or routini-
sed way. This means that reliability and validity is less of an issue the more of a routine the
interview is for the participants, and the more mundane are the topics discussed and the words
used. When the interview is less of a routine, topics are abstract, and words are unfamiliar or
used in an unfamiliar way, researcher as well as reader should critically assess validity and
reliability. One instance when routine may be questioned, is of course when the interview is
conducted in an unorthodox style of interviewing, as in Wolfson’s criticism of the sociolin-
guistic interview. However, even a more orthodox telephone survey, as argued e.g. by Hout-
koop-Stenstra, may not be a routine matter for the respondents involved.
To Houtkoop-Stenstra the interviewer should attempt to minimise problems by approa-
ching the interview to the routine event of an everyday conversation e.g. by ‘recipient desig-
ning’ questions. Briggs’ point, that the interviewer needs to adopt the informant’s metacom-
municative repertoires, could be seen as a similar strategy. Both strategies emphasise em-
pathic communication rather than formalisation, and thus stress interpersonal communication
over standardisation and objectification. As will be discussed below, this convergence to the
interlocutor could well be a fundamental in human communication; however, it also carries
with it certain negative potentials.
5. Speech Accommodation Theory
Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT) has many points in common with Heegaard et al.’s
analysis sketched above. Giles (1973) shows how speaker’s styles are affected by each other,
and that the vernaculars that the classic sociolinguistic interview seeks to record, are therefore
effected by whom the informant speaks to; e.g. a middle aged or a young man, a RP speaker
or a speaker of a regional variant. This find has later been applied to a variety of different so-
cial settings, consistently showing that speakers accommodate to each other (see Giles &
Coupland 1991: 60-93 for an overview). The typical accommodation is convergence, i.e. ap-
proximating one’s own style to that of the interlocutor. However, the opposite, divergence,
accentuating differences, is also found. In general, convergence is found to be the unmarked
strategy for most speakers in most situations, divergence marking a rather strong antagonism
to the interlocutor. Furthermore, the force of convergence and divergence is found everywhe-
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