The popularity of interviewing as a method of data collection in the social sciences is a recognized fact. In their survey of qualitative research paradigms and methods, Denzin and Lincoln (2004:353) declare that “the interview is the favorite methodological tool of the qualitative researcher.” And, describing data-collection techniques in sociolinguistics and dialectology, Fuller (2000:388) argues that “much of the data in the field comes from interviews.” These assertions are hardly surprising given the central role that interviews have assumed as an essential part of the toolkit of the qualitative researcher since the early decades of the twentieth century (Fontana & Frei 2004). Interviews are the most common cross-disciplinary research instruments since they are widely used by investigators in fields as diverse as education, anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and social history, where they serve as vital research methods alone or in combination with other techniques such as participant observation. Given the centrality of interpretive and qualitative research paradigms in sociolinguistics, ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and narrative studies, the interview has acquired an even more prominent place for investigation in these disciplines. However, this research method and tool for collecting data has been the object of extremes of confidence and criticism. On one side there are those who try to erase the interactional context of the interview, believing that it is both possible and desirable to make participants forget about the event so that interviewers can access their “natural” behavior. On the opposite side there are those who argue that interviews are “inauthentic” and “artificial” contexts for data collection and therefore it is best to avoid them completely. In both extremes, the interview ends up being a problem to overcome. One unfortunate result of these attitudes has been that the interview as a real communicative event has been understudied. Our objective with this special issue is to contribute to redressing this tendency by drawing attention to the need for, and advantages of, the research interview as a legitimate interactional encounter, and taking narrative as our focus. In doing this we build on a small but significant cross-disciplinary body of mostly recent scholarship that has analyzed a variety of issues related to the use of semi-structured and open-ended interviews in qualitative research, and that has recognized the crucial importance of placing interview data in context.

The structure and function of a sociolinguistic interview sets up a context that affords informants the opportunity to achieve their own goals. We examine how an informant manipulates the reception format of the speech event, using embedded orientation to characterize information as alternately given or new, and the interviewer consequently as an insider or outsider. Whereas previous analyses have examined how embedded orientation highlights or sheds light on information in complicating action clauses, we posit that the content of embedded orientation clauses is important in and of itself. Rather than serving as simply background information, embedded orientation can do important ideological work. In the case here, embedded orientation introduces into the narrative traces of a local story—the history of local Fascism, a topic that is rarely discussed in the teller's community. (Embedded orientation, narrative, sociolinguistic interview)

In this article I focus on the influence of researcher/informant roles on the types of narratives that are produced and on the ways in which storytelling interactions are managed in research contexts. In particular, I show that storytelling activities and story types both reflect and shape relationships among participants based, among other factors, on their local management of situational and portable identities. I argue that one important methodological consequence of the analysis is the recognition of the fact that all data produced in interaction (including interviews) are irreducibly context-bound and that therefore an analytical separation between observer and observed is impossible. I also discuss how a treatment of the research event and of storytelling in it as a real interactional encounter can shed light on issues related to the insider-outsider status of the researcher and the Observer's Paradox (Labov 1972b). (Narrative, interviews, interactional roles, immigrants, identities).

Interviews are designed to gather propositional information communicated through reference and predication. Some lament the fact that interviews always include interactional positioning that presupposes and sometimes creates social identities and power relationships. Interactional aspects of interview events threaten to corrupt the propositional information communicated, and it appears that these aspects need to be controlled. Interviews do often yield useful propositional information, and interviewers must guard against the sometimes-corrupting influence of interactional factors. But we argue that the interactional aspects of interview events can also be valuable data. Interview subjects sometimes position themselves in ways that reveal something about the habitual positioning that characterizes individuals or groups. We illustrate the potential value of this interactional information by describing “payday mugging” stories told by interviewees in one New Latino Diaspora town. (Interview data, narrating events, transference)

This article concentrates on how interviewees experience the context of semi-structured or open interviews as a “test,” both in terms of being an interviewee and in terms of the roles presupposed in what the interview is about. It invites a reflexive discourse-analytical turn in which we concentrate on the interactional negotiation of various aspects of the interview situation and the interview as an interactional accomplishment. The focus is on the implications for the status of the data that was subsequently obtained, with an eye to locating “the social forces that impress on the ethnographic locale” (Burawoy 1998:15). Insights obtained in this way are argued to bear directly on our understanding of the central research topic under investigation. The data used here have been drawn from a research project on social class and coding orientations in experiential accounts of child protection in Belgium/Flanders. The data base consists of interviews with parent clients. (Data histories, narrative, interview as test, social class, child protection, ethnographic reflexivity)

This article examines narratives of professional experience in a corpus of forty interviews in which English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers reflect on their professional life histories as well as their current teaching. The notion of “stance” emerged as a major theme: the teachers positioned themselves in relation to the policy environment, to learners, teaching and learning, and their sense of control in their working lives. Narrative was an important discursive resource for doing so and a range of narrative types (personal, generic/iterative, hypothetical, exemplum, and ‘negated’) are identified, each demonstrating performance features. Using Dubois's (2007) definition of stance, I examine the dynamic relationship between stance taking and discursive positioning, discussing the role of performance in these processes. Shifts into performance are shown to depend on participant roles and alignments in the interviews rather than on particular narrative types. Thus, the data contradicts some of Wolfson's (1976) observations on narratives in the research interview. The analysis contributes to our understanding of the research interview as a dynamically co-constructed speech genre rather than as a neutral locus for gathering data. (Professional narrative, performance, stance, alignment, positioning)

In this article I challenge the notion that interviews are artificial speech events, by comparing how one participant told stories in a sociolinguistic interview and again in a subsequent spontaneous conversation. As shown by qualitative and quantitative comparison of speaker-role inhabitance (Koven 2002, 2007), I show that the interview stories are no less involved (Tannen 1989), and are actually more interlocutory than the conversational stories. With these comparative materials, I demonstrate how interviews may be contexts in which people (re)tell experiences that they may also tell in “naturally occurring” contexts. (Narrative, interviews, footing, retellings)

Narratives in interviews involve the alignment of two chronotopes (Bakhtin's term, literally ‘time-space’) or what has traditionally been termed the narrated and narrating events. While narrators are expected to separate the there-and-then narrated-event chronotope from the here-and-now narrating-event chronotope, tropic forms of coeval alignment exist that erase or blur the line between the two events, as if they were occurring in the same time and place. In this article I argue for the need to map these shifting alignments in interviews. This article begins with, but then moves beyond, the familiar case of the “historical present,” where narrators shift into using nonpast temporal deixis for past events. Drawing first on an oral narrative from Italy, I show how resources besides the historical present can produce similar alignment effects. In order to demonstrate more extreme forms of coeval alignment, I then compare these data with those from a Senegalese narrator in Dakar who transposes participants “into” his stories. Through this comparison I illustrate how cross-chronotope alignment reveals the way narrators manage the relationship between story and event in interviews. Mapping these shifting alignments can help illuminate the emergent relations between interviewer and interviewee and hence show how stories reflect and shape the interview context in which they occur. (Narrative, interview, chronotope, historical present, Italian, Senegal)*