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

This is not to say that Schober and Conrad’s results are insignificant for attitude inter-
views, but conversational interviewing styles may not remedy the problem since attitude in-
terviews are probably more given to interactional dynamics than fact-finding interviews.
4. An attack from anthropology
Interview methodologies have been criticised not only for neglecting to appreciate the conver-
sational aspects of the interview; the methods are criticised also on an even more fundamental
ground. Namely by anthropologists arguing that the very question-and-answer procedure that
standardised as well as qualitative interviews rely on, may not be a natural and unproblematic
speech genre at all. I.e. not just standardisation is potentially misled; the very belief that ques-
tion-and-answer sequences are appropriate information seeking devices, is troublesome. Con-
sequently, not only are questions and answers to be analysed as interactional products, the so-
cial situation that facilitates questions and answers need examination.
Wolfson (1976) argues that Labov’s sociolingustic interviews (see Labov 1984 for a de-
scription) is not a known speech event in the cultures which Labov investigates, and that the
unfamiliarity of the speech event renders interviews an unsatisfactory source of linguistic data.
Importantly, Labov’s ideal of interviewing is not standardisation, but for the interviewer to
become an ‘intimate stranger’ to the respondent. That is, the interviewer does not enter into
the interview with a set list of questions to be answered, but rather attempts to follow the re-
spondent’s leads, and only subtly guide the interview through a set of topics that should be
covered. On the face of it, this is what conversationalists do all the time, follow each other’s
leads and ask for clarifications and elaborations when needed. But, Wolfson argues, this natu-
ralness of the sociolinguistic interview is a mock - being partly an interview, i.e. being defi-
ned as to who gets to ask questions and who will answer them, and partly a conversation (or
even a therapy session). This, Wolfson argues, inevitably leads to embarrassing situations
where interviewer, respondent or both are unclear about which rules to follow. The conclu-
sion from Wolfson’s criticism is twofold. On the one hand, the sociolinguistic interview does
not offer the opportunity for gathering vernacular speech that is intended. Instead of decrea-
sing the respondent’s attention to his speech, the ‘intimate stranger’-method can increase the
attention paid, since it often leads to uncomfortable situations. On the other, the conversations
recorded through the sociolinguistic interview cannot be viewed as ‘natural’ speech (ibid:
201f.). The term ‘natural’ speech (apparently more or less synonymous with ‘vernacular’) is
abandoned altogether. Instead of speaking of more or less ‘natural’ speech, Wolfson argues
we should speak of ‘situationally appropriate speech’.
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