Interpretivist Interviewing

Abstract Interpretivist interviewing is a tool for self-reflectively exploring in fine and personal detail how people experience and conceive of phenomena that range from migration to democracy to genocide. It does so by exploring with interviewees how they give sense to their world and by analyzing the ways in which both interviewee and interviewer co-generate that knowledge in an interactive dance inflected by situated power dynamics and self-presentations. Rather than attempting to insulate the interview from so-called “bias” and “contamination”—an aspiration ill-suited to interpretivism—the roles of interviewer and interviewee are instead examined to show how the interviewer and interviewee’s respective concerns and interests, along with the play of power and presentation which results, shape the knowledge they co-construct. Fully grasping what is distinctive about and valuable in interpretivist interviewing requires understanding the interpretivist methodological presuppositions it enacts. This chapter thus provides a brief overview of those presuppositions and contrasts them with the presuppositions of positivist methodology, sketches out the divergent consequences of these two sets of presuppositions for how interviews are conceived, and discusses two core sets of interviewing practices that flow from interpretivist methodology: the contextual investigation of meaning-making on the one hand and reflexivity with special attentiveness to positionality and self-presentation on the other.