Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Interviewing: Unstructured and Semistructured 225
a language that you’ll need for research, these practice interviews will help
you sharpen your skills at interviewing in that language.
Even if you are going off to the interior of the Amazon, this doesn’t let you
off the hook. It is unlikely that you’ll find native speakers of Yanomami on
your campus, but you cannot use this as an excuse to wait until you’re out in
the field to learn general interviewing skills. Interviewing skills are honed by
practice. Among the most constructive things you can do in preparing for field
research is to practice conducting unstructured and semistructured interviewing.
Learn to interview in Portuguese or Spanish (depending on whether the
Yanomami you are going to visit live in the Brazilian or Venezuelan Amazon)
before heading for the field and you’ll be way ahead.
Pacing the Study
Two of the biggest problems faced by researchers who rely heavily on semistructured
interviews are boredom and fatigue. Even small projects may
require 30–40 interviews to generate sufficient data to be worthwhile. Most
field researchers collect their own interview data, and asking the same questions
over and over again can get pretty old. Gorden (1975) studied 30 interviewers
who worked for 12 days doing about two tape-recorded interviews per
day. Each interview was from 1 to 2 hours long.
The first interview on each day, over all interviewers, averaged about 30
pages of transcription. The second averaged only 25 pages. Furthermore, the
first interviews, on average, got shorter and shorter during the 12-day period
of the study. In other words, on any given day, boredom made the second
interview shorter, and over the 12 days, boredom (and possibly fatigue) took
its toll on the first interviews of each day.
Even anthropologists who spend a year in the field may have focused bouts
of interviewing on a particular topic. Plan each project, or subproject, in
advance and calculate the number of interviews you are going to get. Pace
yourself. Spread the project out if possible, and don’t try to bring in all your
interview data in the shortest possible time—unless you’re studying reactions
to a hot issue, in which case, spreading things out can create a serious history
confound (see chapter 4).
Here’s the tradeoff: The longer a project takes, the less likely that the first
interviews and the last interviews will be valid indicators of the same things.
In long-term, participant observation fieldwork (6 months to a year), I recommend
going back to your early informants and interviewing them a second
time. See whether their observations and attitudes have changed, and if so,
why.