Comments on: How I Write Interview Instruments – #RoR2018 /2017/12/11/how-i-write-interview-instruments-ror2018/ Mon, 11 Dec 2017 23:57:28 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 By: Dick /2017/12/11/how-i-write-interview-instruments-ror2018/comment-page-1/#comment-21 Mon, 11 Dec 2017 23:57:28 +0000 https://anthrodendum.org/?p=303#comment-21 In reply to John McCreery.

Hi John. Thanks for your thoughts. I appreciate that. I know exactly what you’re talking about and I did consider writing a little on that bit, but I thought it best to just stick to writing about the instrument itself. Those kinds of reflections about interest or discomfort, for example, do get filtered out in a way when one writes an instrument this way. For instance, when I was writing out questions from the Pregnancy Journal, I found myself wondering, “Are lower and working class Senegalese couples interested in tracking the fetal development of their yet-born-child?” This is a question I could ask explicitly, but I’m pretty sure I know that the answer. (I’ll probably ask early on in focus group interviews just to confirm, though.) I will probably end up leaving this question of the instruments, but that doesn’t mean leaving it out of the research – I just have to move it over to the participant-observation realm and keep my eyes and ears open for it. Another kind of question that I didn’t get into in the article are those in which we ask for a lot of information at once. I might start with the demographic/life history question, “Tell me about yourself, where you grew up, and how long you’ve been in Dakar?” On the instrument itself, I would list three check boxes for probes beneath the question: 1. Where, 2. Duration in Dakar, 3. Social ties (the people in your life). These are things I’m keeping an ear out for, but if they don’t mention them, I can ask. I suppose that researchers might also include a space to write about the respondent’s emotional state or body language, right? I haven’t done that, though I do write about those things when they become salient.

]]> By: John McCreery /2017/12/11/how-i-write-interview-instruments-ror2018/comment-page-1/#comment-20 Mon, 11 Dec 2017 23:38:25 +0000 https://anthrodendum.org/?p=303#comment-20 Dick, what you are doing sounds great, something from another galaxy far from the “Go forth and find something interesting” of the minimal methods training I received at Cornell in the late 1960s. Allow me to ask, however, where are the questions you ask yourself, e.g., about observed changes in behavior as people answer your questions. I assume that some questions will elicit standard “pat” answers, others will stimulate interviewees to think beyond their habitual preconceptions, some may make them uncomfortable, and how they respond to that discomfort can be informative. I recall Vic Turner’s teaching that ethnographers deal with three kinds of data, their own observations, the native exegesis, i.e., what people say when asked “What does that mean? Or what is that for?”, and other information, bits of theory and data that we bring to the field as our intellectual baggage. Vic was adamant that none of these three kinds of data could provide a definitive explanation, not least because they frequently contradict each other. The ethnographer’s job, he said, was to create a coherent picture in which all three played a part. This is the context in which I read your account of your protocols as sophisticated attempts to improve the quality of the native exegesis you hear, an important goal in itself. But I wonder where observation of behavior suggesting unusual interest or discomfort, in particular, come in.

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