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

have done their work and it is now time to pull them out and examine what they have helped
us take for granted” (ibid: 396).
I have presented some of the criticisms that have been raised against objectivity in inter-
views as interactions. If insisted on, these points of criticism would paint a rather gloomy pic-
ture for the future of interview research. Apparently, the future does not lie in improving on
standardisation through better question formulation, as the fundamental criticism of standardi-
sed interviewing from a CA background shows. Neither does it lie in a more interactive inter-
viewing – as pointed out in the discussion of accommodation theory. One possible future for
interviewing then could be to accept that standardisation is not feasible in human interaction,
since different contexts (linguistic as well as interpersonal and physical) will always effect
answers and render them incomparable. This would force us to reject standardisation and thus
the notion of the interview being an experimental method. Instead, we would view it as a lin-
guistic interaction on a par with all other linguistic interactions, an interaction where both par-
ticipants cooperate in producing the outcome as in other linguistic interactions. Only one ma-
jor difference from most other interactions would remain, namely that the topics of this inte-
raction are (more or less) defined in advance. In this vein, I believe the excerpts presented
above give us new information about the perceptions of the respondents; though as was ar-
gued, the very aspects that make them interesting are the same that makes them incomparable
to others. Abandoning standardisation would therefore not mean giving up on interview re-
search; perhaps it would instead lead to a renewed interest in interviews as interactional
methods.
However, seeing how popular interview methods are in social sciences, market research,
voting polls etc and how massive the demand for ‘hard’ data in the human and social sciences
is, this is not a likely outcome. Another, less drastic and more feasible, future would be to pay
attention to the fundamental criticism in our interpretation and use of interview data. Much
interview research presented today has a certain ‘rabbit out of the hat’ quality to it. A resear-
cher composes questions and leaves the interviewing in the hands of others, e.g. students or a
survey institute. Data are given back as pure numbers, the transition seemingly a simple,
straightforward one, and the researcher is left unaware of any interactional troubles that might
have occurred or indeed if respondents understood his questions as he inadvertently assumes
they did. If researchers took an interest in the interactions, their results would probably be
presented with less confidence and more discussion.
Summing up, the problems seemingly arise because we take upon us a simplistic model
of language when the enterprise is attitude research and the method is interviews; a model that
108