Interviews

Although the rise of alternative methodologies suggest that the primacy of the interview as a research method may be waning, it is still accurate to say that the majority of discursive approaches to social psychological research privilege interviews as a means of generating material that can be analysed as data. (As asserted by Baker (2004), the interview process from a social constructionist perspective is better described as data ‘making’ or

‘generation’ as opposed to data ‘collection’.) Wetherell argues that interviews are a means of accessing “the cultural resources people have available for telling their patch of the world” and that when drawing from a relatively large corpus of interviews, “repetition and clear patterns emerge”. She relates this to her ‘synthetic’ model of analysis, arguing that interviews are an example of how local talk connects with discursive history (Wetherell, 2003, p. 13).

While there has been some criticism of interview data as being illegitimate due to not being ‘naturally occurring’, Holstein and Gubrium have argued that this distinction is not easily made. Seemingly spontaneous, naturally occurring talk and interaction are not necessarily any more authentic or bias-free than interviews; they simply happen to have been staged by persons other than an interviewer in what have been conventionally recognised as non-interview settings. Furthermore, they argue that the development of ‘the interview society’ has made the interview ‘a naturally occurring occasion in its own right for articulating experience’ (Holstein & Gubrium, 2004, p. 155). This notion of ‘the

interview society’ posits that the interview has become such a staple of modern culture over the last 50 years, and is such a routine occurrence in everyday life, whether through job applications, chat shows, news bulletins etc., that for many people, participating in a research interview will come as almost second nature.

In addition to this notion of the ‘interview society’, Taylor and Littleton have argued that for many people being interviewed will not only ‘come naturally’, but may be an enjoyable experience; “a congenial performance context for first person narration which speakers find pleasurable” (S. Taylor & Littleton, 2006, p. 28). They also refer to interviews as an

“ongoing interaction” in which “meanings are reinforced, challenged and negotiated between interlocutors”, an understanding which is crucial to a social constructionist stance on the interview process. Especially notable is the use of the word ‘interlocutors’ rather than ‘interviewer’ and ‘participant’ – the status of the interviewer as researcher is not seen as giving his or her utterances a privileged position, nor are they seen as neutral speech actions whose only function is to elicit a reaction from participants. Rather, the interview data is something that has been mutually constructed by both parties to the interview and the linguistic nuance of the researcher’s questions becomes as analytically important as that of the interviewee’s answers (Potter & Wetherell, 1987, p. 165). This notion of the researcher as ‘active’ is expanded upon by Holstein and Gubrium:

Meaning is not merely elicited by apt questioning, nor simply transported through respondent replies; it is actively and communicatively assembled in the interview encounter. Respondents are not so much repositories of knowledge – treasuries of information awaiting excavation, so to speak – as they are constructors of knowledge in collaboration with interviewers. (Holstein & Gubrium, 1999, p. 106)

However, even allowing for the interview as something that is actively constructed between both parties to the interview, Kvale (2006) has stressed the importance of attending to power relations in the interview process. He argues that, despite what he describes as the popular perception of qualitative research interviewing as a democratic and emancipatory process, the interview entails an assymetrical power relationship between interviewer and interviewee due to the interviewer’s monopoly of interpretation (Kvale, 2006, p. 484).

Given this monopoly of interpretation held by the interviewer as analyst, it might be argued that in reporting interview data, the researcher has an obligation both to the participant and the reader to provide sufficient context that alternative interpretations can be drawn. As has already been noted, from the perspective of seeing the interview as actively constructed, the researcher’s questions are seen as ‘just as much a topic of analysis as the interviewee’s answers’ (Potter & Wetherell, 1987, p. 165). To present a snippet of interview material without any related context may be considered ‘under-analysis through isolated quotation’ (Antaki, Billig, Edwards, & Potter, 2003). Providing such context not only allows the reader gain a greater insight on the ‘identity work’ done by the interviewee, but also that done by the interviewer. Rapley (2001) argues that the interviewers’ identity work is central in the interview interaction and as such is a vital aspect in the analysis and the presentation of the data (Rapley, 2001, p. 317).

In the case of this research, the interview may be seen as an encounter where I and the participant mutually constructed the notion of an authentic Irishness, and both engaged in identity work around this construction. However, due to the nature of the research, the content of the interviews focused more on the participants’ accounts of ‘living Irish’, the construction of their own ‘personal’ Irish identities and how these related to canonical narratives of Irishness. This prioritisation of the personal accounts of the participants,

however, did not rule out moments where the participants questioned me about my personal narrative of ‘living Irish’, or positioned me as a certain type of Irish person. I will discuss such moments later in the chapter.