Postmodern Interviewing
- Jaber F. Gubrium - University of Missouri, USA
- James A. Holstein - Marquette University, USA
Interviewing (Qualitative Research)
Interview roles are less clear than they once were, and in some cases, the roles are even exchanged to promote new opportunities for understanding the shape and evolution of selves and experience.
Postmodern Interviewing offers readers an exploration of the postmodern interview, a conversation with diverse purposes in which the communicative format is constructed as much within the interview conversation as it stems from predesignated research interests. It provides cutting-edge discussions of emerging horizons, featuring reflexivity, poetics, and power, along with discussions of new ways of gathering experiential knowledge. Employing concepts from anthropology, family studies, history, and sociology, the contributors present the ambitious new directions in which the interview has gone, such as:
- How the interview process is refracted through the lens of language, knowledge, culture, and difference
- How the dividing line between fact and fiction is blurred to promote richer understanding
- How standardized representation has given way to representational invention
By exploring these exciting developments, readers will be exposed to the engaging opportunities for understanding the shape and evolution of selves and social worlds that are made possible through changes in the interview process.
This volume is comprised of chapters from the Handbook of Interview Research (Gubrium and Holstein, SAGE, 2001). The companion volume, Inside Interviewing (SAGE, 2003), is also comprised of chapters from the Handbook.
It is a great collection of texts on a postmodern view of interviewing, essential for anyone interested in a more reflective understanding of interviewing in qualitative research. Especially the essay on the interview society by Gubrium and Holstein is key for making students reflect on the role of the interview for contemporary societies and in the fashioning of (post)modern subjectivity. The chapter by Atkinson and Coffey is essential for understanding the relationship between interviewing and participant observation, and key for countering more naturalistic understandings of participant observaton that are often at the root of a priviliging of participant observation as method in parts of ethnographically oriented social research. Both texts are required reading in the course.
I find this book extremely useful in making an attempt to understand in general the term 'postmodern' especially when interviews are used as a research instrument. I really liked chapter 3 where the postmodern trends in interviewing were discussed mentioning feminism, phenomenology etc.
I find this book extremely useful in adressing postmodern interviewing issues.
Detailed analysis on postmodern perspectives of research when engaging in interviews during research. Offers a particularly valuable discussion on the role of the researcher within the interview process.
This is a good text for students to learn the interview process and how to divide the line between fact and fiction