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

Doris’ discourse (and JC’s sociolinguistic behaviours related to them) could be found in
young peer interactions, particularly when there is an imbalance across interlocutor’s life
events and experiences […]” (ibid: 22). I claim that this is a highly relevant statement for in-
tercultural interviewing, and in essence, all interviews. There is, in other words, a risk that
omnipresent ‘politeness’ strategies and accommodation of talk will mean locking respondents
in stereotyped categories. The risk is minor if true standardised interviews were feasible, but
as discussed above, standardisation is probably more of an ideal than a reality. All the same,
much modern interviewing attempts a qualitative and hermeneutic description of informants’
experiences rather than a strictly quantitative and standardised (e.g. Kvale 1997). To these
approaches Coupland et al.’s finds are crucial. They show that the dynamics of the intergene-
rational interactions, which may very likely also be at play in intercultural interactions, effec-
tively delimits which questions can reasonably be addressed to a respondent. It is highly unli-
kely that an interviewer in an interview will be insensitive to social constraints on his questio-
ning. Firstly, because he is a social individual (cf. CA’s points about the intrusion of everyday
conversations in formal interviews). Secondly, because transgressing social constraints might
lead to the informant terminating the interview, and certainly will make the interview situati-
on highly salient, both to the disadvantage of the interview.
It is difficult to give short and illustrative examples of over-accommodation or ‘ideolo-
gical matching’ since these are strategies deployed exactly to keep the conversation running
smoothly, and therefore usually are subtle and inobtrusive. However, if we return to the ex-
cerpts already given, some incidents could be extracted. In excerpt 1 (the mother tongue ex-
ample) the interviewer participates in ideological matching by not questioning the informant’s
new meaning of the word. Effectively then the ‘new’ meaning is then put on record as the in-
formant’s own understanding of the word, where a critical response might have led her to ad-
just her understanding. This is however not what happened following the critical response in
excerpt 2, which may then show the effect of an instance of ‘under’-accommodation. Excerpt
3 certainly shows an attempt to accommodate to the perceived competence of the informant
when the interviewer points out the supposed opposition between the two questions. To judge
whether this is an instance of over-, under- or simply accommodation, we would need to
know if the informant understood the question as it was intended by the interviewer, so-
mething that cannot be established from the excerpt. Excerpt 4 could be argued to show
instances of over-accommodation when the interviewer does not question or probe the infor-
mant’s evading, vague answers, but rather accepts them – something he would surely not do
with an interlocutor deemed more rhetorically competent.
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