Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and broadens repeatedly as the fieldworker searches for breadth and depth of
observation. Only by both penetrating the depth and skimming the surface can
the ethnographer portray the cultural landscape in detail rich enough for others
to comprehend and appreciate.
INTERVIEWING
The interview is the ethnographer's most important data-gathering technique.
Interviews explain and put into a larger context what the ethnographer sees and
experiences. They require verbal interaction, and language in the commodity
of discourse. Words and expressions have different values in various cultures.
People exchange these verbal commodities to communicate. The ethnographer
quickly learns to savor the informant's every word for its cultural or subcul-
tural connotations as well as for its denotative meaning. General interview
types include structured, semistructured, informal, and retrospective inter-
views. Although in practice these types overlap and blend, this chapter will
artificially isolate interview types, strategies, and questions for purposes of
description and discussion. Each interviewing approach has a role to play in
soliciting information. The ethnographer, however, should be clear on the pros
and cons of each interview type in data collection and analysis before employ-
ing these approaches in the field (for alternative approaches to classifying
interviews, see Denzin, 1978; Goetz & LeCompte, 1984; Patton, 2001; for
additional discussion about interviewing techniques, see Atkinson &
Hammersley, 2007; Bogdan & Biklen, 1982; Taylor & Bogdan, 1988; Werner
& Schoepfle, 1987a).
Formally structured and semistructured interviews are verbal approxima-
tions of a questionnaire with explicit research goals. These interviews gener-
ally serve comparative and representative purposes—comparing responses and
putting them in the context of common group beliefs and themes. The field-
worker can use a structured interview at any time in the study. For example, a
list of questions about the educational background of the teachers in a school
under study is useful in securing comparative baseline data about the teachers'
qualifications and experience. Asking those questions can also be a nonthreat-
ening icebreaker. At the beginning stages of a study, however, structured inter-
views tend to shape responses to conform to the researcher's conception of
how the world works. These interviews are therefore most useful at the middle
and end stages of a study for the collection of data about a specific question
or hypothesis. A structured or semistructured interview is most valuable when
the fieldworker comprehends the fundamentals of a community from the
