Counting
A nice NCRM Methods Review bringing together lots of people together, asking ‘how many interviews is enough?’
Les Back:
Perhaps as researchers today we need to lessen our dependence on the interview itself. I would go as far to argue that the capacity to record voices accurately meant that researchers became less observant and actually less involved in the social world. It was on tape so we could stop watching and listening. As Harvey Sacks warned in a lecture give in the spring of 1965: “The tape-recorder is important, but a lot of this [observational study] can be done without a tape-recorder” (Sacks 1992: 28). Strangely I think this has made social researchers less well equipped to achieve vivid descriptions in their writing. We have an opportunity today to think about how to develop new ways of training our sociological attention, our understanding of qualitative data beyond text to include image, sound and sensuous life that will also enhance our representations of the social world.
Howard Becker:
you have to think in a different way, asking how you can convince skeptics—people who will not want to accept that what you say is how things works is how they actually do work—that you’re right and they have to accept it. Many people will be eager to show that you’re wrong: doctors in the town you studied may think you have given an unfavorable picture of how they work and will search for any weak spots in your argument. You can deal with this by being there before them. Imagine just what the most fervent critic of your conclusion would say to prove that you were wrong and then ask yourself what you could do to forestall that criticism—and do it. If you can’t think of how to get that result, don’t say what you can’t demonstrate convincingly enough to shut critics up.
Daniel Miller:
Mostly what people say is the legitimation of what they do, not the explanation or the description. So my ideal number might be 0. The primary method of ethnography is participant observation. It is better to be immersed in people’s everyday life and also listen in to the conversations they have with the people they live with, rather than carrying out the artificial procedure that we call an interview. In my more ethnographic works I look more to people’s interactions with things, and the evidence for what they actually do. On the other hand how people legitimate their actions is significant, which suggests that placed alongside direct observation the interview may have a role to play. We should be careful about language as evidence but I am not suggesting that we ignore it entirely.
