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

we would never agree to otherwise. When attempting to standardise interactions we in effect
adopt a model of language in which each sign has one and only one meaning, independent of
context and the persons talking. That is, the kind of lexical meaning one would find in a dic-
tionary, but hardly in real interactions. If we did not, we could not assume that different peo-
ple’s responses to similar vocal stimuli were comparable.
What I would argue is that we need to pragmatically assess whether it is reasonable to
assume that informants’ responses are actually comparable or not. Two criteria come into play:
On the one hand, is it reasonable to assume that the questions and answers were given in a
situation equally familiar to all respondents? In other words, were they performing the same
tasks? On the other, is it reasonable to assume that the researcher’s interpretation of the ques-
tion and of the answers is the only one – indeed that it is a plausible one at all?
To take an example, an election can be regarded as a questionnaire with one question
and an array of possible answers. It is very likely that each ‘respondent’ (voter) understand
the situation in the same way and thus interpret their task as the same, viz. ‘put an X next to
the name of your preferred candidate’. Likewise, the possibility for interpreting the question
differently from what was intended is effectively cancelled out due to the routine of voting
being a familiar genre. Curiously, one can gain anecdotal support for a claim to ‘routinisation’
from the 2000 US election. The introduction of new (unfamiliar) voting machines in Palm
Beach County, Florida, is said to have led voters who wanted to vote for Al Gore to actually
punch their X next to the name of Pat Buchanan – effectively leading to George Bush’ victory
in Florida and later in the whole of the country.
As another, less anecdotal, example of a problematic genre, I have presented excerpts
from interviews above. Here, where the routine is unknown to them, we see respondents dis-
playing doubts regarding how to answer questions. We see e.g. some missing the point that
they are supposed to give elaborate verbal accounts for their answers, a simple ‘oh well, you
know’, is not anticipated as part of the interview genre – though very common in everyday
statements of attitudes. Equally, we see that different respondents will interpret questions dif-
ferently when they are as abstract as the one above about ‘mother tongue’.
What I will point out then, is that interviews are first and foremost interactions between
social beings, and that interview data should be regarded as the outcome of such interactions.
The need for qualitative interpretation is thus a prerequisite for understanding attitude re-
search, and no matter how ‘hard’ quantitative attitude data may seem, they are still susceptible
to hermeneutic interpretation.
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