A while back my mom asked what interviewing is like. The answer is that it’s a lot harder than it seems like it should be. Anticipating how people are going to interpret your questions, and trying to rephrase them appropriately is tough. Rephrasing is surprisingly difficult in everyday conversation in general, because (British trained) Twi speakers use different kinds of phrases than Canadians. For example, today I was trying to say “he goes to school with me” in Twi, and when the person finally understood what I meant, they rephrased it as “he is your classmate” in English. It makes perfect sense, but it isn’t the phrase that jumps to mind.
From my interviews I had a question that was really painfully phrased about what conditions do people find are important to be in place in order for marriage counseling to be effective. That’s painful even for an English speaker. It took me a couple of interviews to come up with the streamlined and comprehensible “what circumstances make counseling a couple difficult?” The thing is, I was originally wondering if such and such or another circumstance might come up, and I phrased the question trying to ask that indirectly. Those kinds of questions are almost always disasters, but the trick is to figure out which broad and sensible questions will elicit the kinds of examples you are looking for, while allowing examples that you haven’t thought of already to emerge.
Anyway, it is getting easier, an so I have hopes that all will work out and I’ll have a dissertation to write at the end of this :)
Filed under: Anthropology
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And the next trick will be recognizing those subtle expressions and phrases that tell you how guarded or euphamistic the answers are. Someone once commented that he had spent 12 years in India, so he was just beginning to get a handle on the culture. What he meant wasn’t that it took that long to have any idea about it, but to move to those levels of subtlty that allow for that unspoken understanding. You have your work cut out for you.
On another anthro site a person doing fieldwork commented in passing that she noted that many people had sort of “scripted” stories they used to described things that had happened to them, even in her interviews with them.
Now, the type of research this person was doing involved talking with people who were in a position where they had to relay some bit of history over and over, so this sort of scripted or programmed story-telling might be more common for them.
This reminded me that many of us have the same sorts of techniques we use when relaying a story we have told over and over. I suspect this is, in part, the root of shaggy dog and fish-that-got-away stories.
Not that this technique is limited to “fun” stories, of course. I think when someone is in a high stress or unfortunate situation, where they are expected to “tell me in your own words your side of the story” (for example, when giving evidence for a court case) the tendency is toward similar story telling tropes.