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

There are several reasons for complimenting quantitative measures with qualitative,
not least the wish to gain insights into informants’ own thinking about the questions the re-
searchers find it relevant to ask them, i.e. to understand not just which attitudes they hold, but
maybe also why they hold them. The qualitative investigation in question is comprised of 49
interviews with informants from all walks of life, from managers to factory line workers. The
interviews lasted from 45 minutes to 2 hours. Although I call the interviews qualitative, in
fact they involved both quantitative and qualitative interviewing using both a questionnaire
with app. 120 questions as well as audio recordings of the interaction between interviewer and
interviewee during the filling in of the questionnaires (see Thøgersen (2005a) for a discussion
of the use of quantitative and qualitative interview techniques). The informants were actively
encouraged to comment on their filling in, to "think aloud", and to ask questions and comment
on things they did not understand or found irrelevant, stupid etc. The qualitative data are thus
more than anything data about the task of conducting an attitude interview. Through them,
however, we gain new insights into what ordinary people find relevant in arguing an attitude;
and equally important, we have a handle on how the informants understood the questions they
were confronted with. This understanding is not always the one we would immediately expect
when we see the questionnaire derived of context.
Variant interpretations
In order to illustrate this point we draw on a question from the MIN survey, viz. the question
“To which extent do you agree that it would be better if everybody in the world spoke English
as their mother tongue?”. The numeric answers as presented in table 3 are striking in that they
suggest that as much as 22 % of the Danes would give up on their native language, Danish, in
favour of English. The qualitative interview posed the same question with similar numeric
results.
Table 3
It would be better if everybody in the world
spoke English as their mother tongue
Agree completely 13.2 %
Agree somewhat 8.9 %
Neither agree nor disagree 4.9 %
Disagree somewhat 12.3 %
Disagree completely 58.9 %
Don’t know 1.8 %
199