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

3. Conversation Analysis
The psychologist Elliot Mishler, in his criticism of survey interviews and claim for a ‘narrati-
ve’ analysis of interviews, states that “the ordinary language competence shared by investiga-
tors and respondents is a critical but unrecognized precondition for effective research” (Mish-
ler 1986: 7). The task of recognising and analysing the ‘unrecognized ordinary language com-
petence’ could well be seen as the very task that research on survey interviews from a Con-
versational Analytic (CA) background answers to. The last few decades have seen a host of
work that tries to analyse the interaction that interviewing represents, through findings from
CA. Suchman & Jordan (1990) sketches out many of the possibilities of this merger, pro-
grammatically stating that:
We find that the validity of survey data is potentially undermined by the same prohibition
against interaction that is intended to ensure reliability. As a remedy, we recommend
a collaborative approach that would allow the kinds of interactional exchanges between
interviewer and respondent necessary to ensure standardized interpretations,
without introducing interviewer bias (Suchman & Jordan 1990: 232).
This sketch has been followed up by attempts to incorporates CA insights in order to improve
on standardised interviewing procedures in various papers by Schaeffer (e.g. Schaeffer 2002,
Schaeffer & Maynard 1996), whereas Houtkoop-Stenstra (2000) presents one of the most ra-
dical attempts to define a ‘new standardisation’ based on freer interviewer roles: “Having stu-
died tape-recorded standardized survey interviews for some years now, I have become increa-
singly convinced that the quest for standardisation is no longer tenable […]” (ibid. 180).
Two points of criticism raised from within a CA background will be presented here. The
first is that question-and-answer-sequences are in a way conversational machines with certain
constraints and certain rules. The consequence, as discussed below, is that no interlocutor (e.g.
an interviewer) can avoid responsibility in the construction of a joint meaning. The other cri-
ticism is the insistence that all utterances must be studied as they are, placed in a linguistic co-
and con-text. That utterances appear in contexts is a truism, but the consequences of this is
most often neglected when data from interviews are presented abstracted from their context.
This questions the validity of standardised interview methods.
3.1 Meaning as an interactive accomplishment
A basic claim of CA is that conversation is always a joint interaction. An utterance procee-
ding another utterance will usually be understood as a response to this. An utterance follo-
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