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

a potential problem. It jeopardized standardization and comparability, but benefited the quali-
tative data by incorporating world-views of a more varied group of informants.
The mean duration of the interviews was about one hour, some took little more than 30
minutes, others lasted over two hours. The interviews consisted of roughly three phases:
• First, the ten questions used in the poll survey were asked in a relatively formal and
standardized way to maximize comparability with the opinion poll survey discussed by
Kristiansen.
• Secondly, these ten questions were discussed in a less structured manner in order to pro-
be for problematic phrases or other difficulties with the questions, and to allow infor-
mants to give arguments or reasons why they answered the way they did. The rationale
here was to attempt to expose the kinds of understandings and arguments that triggered
similar answers in the large-scale opinion survey. From an interactional point of view,
this least structured phase also worked to get informants to ‘think aloud’ rather than to
merely answer in standardized ‘tick-off boxes’.
• The third phase (the lengthy part of most interviews) consisted of structured as well as
unstructured components. Together, the interviewer and the informant went through a
questionnaire (or rather a number of questionnaires) containing the remaining more than
one hundred questions. The issues to be discussed and the questions were pre-
formulated, but informants were encouraged to comment on, argue with, discuss, and
digress from the questions as they pleased. Naturally, this led to rather divergent respon-
ses and thus to a varied set of data. Some informants were talkative and comfortable
discussing language attitudes with a complete stranger; others were not. Thus, some in-
formants gave long and elaborate arguments or narratives, weighing the positive against
the negative in explaining their answers; others stayed rather close to a ‘tick-off box’ ty-
pe of responding.
The hybrid data from the interview, along with the substantial differences between the talkati-
ve and the less talkative informants, yields both problematic and interesting data. On the one
hand, having all informants fill in the same questionnaire give us data that are comparable at
least to some degree. On the other hand, this procedure made the interviews focus more on
issues that the interviewer (and the research team) found relevant, and less on what the infor-
mant might have thought relevant. In methodological terms, it thus also made the analysis less
‘grounded’ (Glasser & Strauss 1967). However, having informants discuss how they un-
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