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

Excerpts will be drawn to highlight how differences in informants’ socio-linguistic back-
grounds as well as socio-linguistic differences between interviewer and informant pose pro-
blems to standardisation 12 .
2. Arguments around standardisation
All science of course contains a certain demand for objectivity. It is demanded that methodo-
logical and analytic choices be theoretically rationalised, and ideally, that another researcher
following the same procedure would end up with the same conclusions. In interview research,
scientific demands is one of two factors that has lead to an attempt for maximum standardisa-
tion of interviews, the other being that standardisation is necessary when one wishes to com-
pare samples of different populations with each other. Without a standard, comparison is sim-
ply not possible.
However, what form standardisation should assume, how standardisation is achieved,
and which consequences it has for analysis, turns out to be a highly disputable matter. Ar-
guing for extreme objectifying standardisation, we have Fowler & Mangione (1990) (see be-
low), whereas some qualitative minded interview theorists, on the other hand (e.g. Mishler
1986, Spradley 1979, Kvale 1997) hold that standardisation is reductionistic and dehumani-
sing, and that standardisation for the purpose of comparison, leaves research blind to the uni-
queness of each individual.
The debate over standardisation vs. non-standardisation is in no way a new one. Already
Lazarfeld (1944) attempted to negotiate between the two poles. However, the debate has been
fuelled by new insights from a range of scientific disciplines including eth-
nography/anthropology as prime users of interview methodology (Briggs 1986, Wolfson 1976)
and Conversation Analytic studies of the interaction during an interview (Houtkoop-Stenstra
2001, Suchman & Jordan 1986). Other linguistic traditions’ work on variation in talk during
the interview could also be included in the debate – most notably maybe Speech Accommoda-
tion Theory’s (SAT) analyses of the Labovian interviews (Giles 1973) and later research into
convergence and divergence of communication within the SAT paradigm.
12 I use the terms ‘informant’, ‘respondent’ and ‘interviewee’ with only a marginal difference. ‘Respondents’
generally belong to the literature of experimental interviews in e.g. psychology and in market researcher’s surveys.
‘Informants’ on the other hand, is the preferred term of anthropology and qualitative minded research. I
generally observe this traditional difference and talk of ‘respondents’ in surveys etc. and ‘informants’ in qualitative
interviews. ‘Interviewee’, I use as a cover term to the two specialised terms. In the excerpts, the abbreviations
‘Interv’ and ‘Resp’ for ‘interviewer’ and ‘respondent’ are used without any special implication about the
type of the interviewees.
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