Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

222 Chapter 9
learn a piece of a puzzle from one informant, you use it with the next informant
to get more information, and so on. The more you seem to know, the
more comfortable people feel about talking to you and the less people feel
they are actually divulging anything. They are not the ones who are giving
away the ‘‘secrets’’ of the group.
Phased assertion also prompts some informants to jump in and correct you
if they think you know a little, but that you’ve ‘‘got it all wrong.’’ In some
cases, I’ve purposely made wrong assertions to provoke a correcting response.
Verbal Respondents
Some people try to tell you too much. They are the kind of people who just
love to have an audience. You ask them one little question and off they go on
one tangent after another, until you become exasperated. Converse and Schuman
(1974:46) recommend ‘‘gentle inattention’’—putting down your pen,
looking away, leafing through your papers. Nigel King (1994:23) recommends
saying something like: ‘‘That’s very interesting. Could we go back to what
you were saying earlier about. . . .’’
You may, however, have to be a bit more obvious. New interviewers, in
particular, may be reluctant to cut off informants, afraid that doing so is poor
interviewing technique. In fact, as William Foote Whyte notes, informants
who want to talk your ear off are probably used to being interrupted. It’s the
only way their friends get a word in edgewise. But you need to learn how to
cut people off without rancor. ‘‘Don’t interrupt accidentally ...,’’Whyte said,
‘‘learn to interrupt gracefully’’ (1960:353, emphasis his). Each situation is
somewhat different; you learn as you go in this business.
Nonverbal Respondents
One of the really tough things you run into is someone telling you ‘‘I don’t
know’’ in answer to lots of questions. In qualitative research projects, where
you choose respondents precisely because you think they know something of
interest, the ‘‘don’t know’’ refrain can be especially frustrating. Converse and
Schuman (1974:49) distinguish four kinds of don’t-know response: (1) I don’t
know (and frankly I don’t care); (2) I don’t know (and it’s none of your business);
(3) I don’t know (actually, I do know, but you wouldn’t be interested
in what I have to say about that); and (4) I don’t know (and I wish you’d
change the subject because this line of questioning makes me really uncomfortable).
There is also the ‘‘(I wish I could help you but) I really don’t know.’’
Sometimes you can get beyond this, sometimes you can’t. You have to face
the fact that not everyone who volunteers to be interviewed is a good respon-