Challenging the sanitized view of participants in standardized surveys, Interviews as Activated Storytelling contends that interviewing is a meaning-making process producing useful but context-sensitive knowledge. Through a series of case studies, the book illustrates that participants are not simply there for asking and answering, but inquire and respond in terms of attendant interests and social worlds. Interview interaction and interpretation must take these into account against standardization. In two parts, chapters explore how conditions of the interview process (contexts) and conceptions of interview participants (subjectivities) narratively inform and shape—activate—interviewing and its results. Together with the previously published book Crafting Ethnographic Fieldwork: Sites, Selves, and Social Worlds, insights into the full range of procedural issues in qualitative research are offered.
Challenging the static view of the respondent that characterizes standardized research interviews, Interviews as Activated Storytelling demonstrates through a series of case studies that interviews are interactional, meaning-making processes that produce useful but context-sensitive knowledge.
Introduction Part I: Contexts
1. Interviews as Activated Storytelling
Occasions
2. Immigrant Belonging: Meaning-Making in Three Interview
Modalities
3. Life as A River: A Metaphor to Activate Marriage Migrants Life
Stories
4. Navigating Small-Town Complexities: Unraveling Attitudes Through
Ethnographic Research
5. Creating Meaning Together: Researcher as
Participant, Collaborator, and Interpreter
6. Contextual Dynamics in
Interviewing in Institutional and Free Settings
7. Activism as an
Interpretive Context for Interviewing Part II: Subjectivities
8. Activating
Subjectivities in Research Interviews
9. Researching, Interviewing, and
Co-Writing the Experiences of a World War II Pilot
10. Activating Prospective
Hindsight Through Rehearsal Studios
11. The Active Respondent
12. Minding
Whens, Whats, and Hows in Social Movement Oral History Interviews
13.
Multi-Active Research Interviews
14. (Re)activated by Objects: Interviewing
with and Beyond Unimodal Dialogue Afterword
Amir B. Marvasti is Professor of Sociology at Penn State Altoona, USA. Amirs research focuses on identity management in everyday encounters and institutional settings. Using a symbolic interactionist framework, he approaches culture, discourse, and social institutions as interrelated and ongoing practices that collectively shape the self in a social context. His empirical research in this area examines how people (e.g., the homeless) present themselves to others, particularly when required to explain their backgrounds and intentions; and how their self-presentations are related to whether they are helped or accepted by others. Extending his interest in identity management to the subfield of the sociology of emotions, his current research looks at how people narrate their emotions in ways that reinforce gender stereotypes.
Jaber F. Gubrium is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Missouri, USA. The working premise of his research program is that no system of social rules is robust enough to understand its everyday application. Areas of study informed by this are aging and the life course, health and illness, human service organizations, constructions of family, institutional selves, and narrative analysis. Applying a critical constructionism, the goal is to make visible the assemblages of meaning that rationalization erases. Centered on the comparative ethnography of human service settings, he continues to explore and document novelty and pattern in troubles/problems reflexivity within the framework of what Erving Goffman called the interaction order and in tandem with a concertedly local brand of Michel Foucaults concept of discursive practice. Jay is also a founding and former editor of the Journal of Aging Studies.
