Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Interviewing: Unstructured and Semistructured 217
nean. I asked him how he knew this, and he challenged me to document it.
Savas had decided that there was something important that I needed to know
and he maneuvered the interview around to make sure I learned it.
This led to about 3 hours of painstaking work. We counted the number of
seasons he’d been to sea over a 46-year career (he remembered that he hadn’t
worked at all during 1943 because of ‘‘something to do with the war’’). We
figured conservatively the number of days he’d spent at sea, the average number
of dives per trip, and the average depth and time per dive. We joked about
the tendency of divers to exaggerate their exploits and about how fragile
human memory is when it comes to this kind of detail.
It was difficult to stay on the subject, because Savas was such a good raconteur
and a perceptive analyst of Kalymnian life. The interview meandered off
on interesting tangents, but after a while, either Savas or I would steer it back
to the issue at hand. In the end, discounting heavily for both exaggeration and
faulty recall, we reckoned that he’d spent at least 10,000 hours—about a year
and a fourth, counting each day as a full 24 hours—under water and had
walked the distance between Alexandria and Tunis at least three times.
The exact numbers really didn’t matter. What did matter was that Savas
Ergas had a really good sense of what he thought I needed to know about the
life of a sponge diver. It was I, the interviewer, who defined the focus of the
interview; but it was Savas, the respondent, who determined the content. And
was I ever glad he did.
Probing
The key to successful interviewing is learning how to probe effectively—
that is, to stimulate a respondent to produce more information, without injecting
yourself so much into the interaction that you only get a reflection of yourself
in the data. Suppose you ask, ‘‘Have you ever been away from the village
to work?’’ and the informant says, ‘‘Yes.’’ The next question (the probe) is:
‘‘Like where?’’ Suppose the answer is, ‘‘Oh, several different places.’’ The
correct response is not, ‘‘Pachuca? Querétaro? Mexico City?’’ but, ‘‘Like
where? Could you name some of the places where you’ve gone to get work?’’
There are many kinds of probes that you can use in an interview. (In what
follows, I draw on the important work by Kluckhohn [1945], Merton et al.
[1956], Kahn and Cannell [1957], Whyte [1960, 1984], Dohrenwend and
Richardson [1965], Gorden [1975], Hyman and Cobb [1975], Warwick and
Lininger [1975], Reed and Stimson [1985], and on my own experience and
that of my students.)