Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2010), 30, 128148.

Cambridge University Press, 2010, 0267-1905/10 $16.00

doi:10.1017/S0267190510000085

Qualitative Interviews in Applied Linguistics: From

Research Instrument to Social Practice
Steven Talmy
Interviews have been used for decades in empirical inquiry across the social
sciences as one or the primary means of generating data. In applied linguistics,
interview research has increased dramatically in recent years, particularly in
qualitative studies that aim to investigate participants identities, experiences,
beliefs, and orientations toward a range of phenomena. However, despite the
proliferation of interview research in qualitative applied linguistics, it has become equally apparent that there is a profound inconsistency in how the interview has been and continues to be theorized in the field. This article critically
reviews a selection of applied linguistics research from the past 5 years that
uses interviews in case study, ethnographic, narrative, (auto)biographical, and
related qualitative frameworks, focusing in particular on the ideologies of language, communication, and the interview, or the communicable cartographies
of interviewing, that are evident in them. By contrasting what is referred to
as an interview as research instrument perspective with a research interview
as social practice orientation, the article argues for greater reflexivity about
the interview methods that qualitative applied linguists use in their studies,
the status ascribed to interview data, and how those data are analyzed and
represented.

INTRODUCTION
Interviews have been used for decades in empirical inquiry across the social
sciences as one or the primary means of generating data. In applied linguistics,
interview studies have increased dramatically in recent years, particularly research that adopts case study, ethnographic, narrative, (auto)biographical, and
related qualitative frameworks. This developing literature continues to address
a rich array of topics and to yield notable insights concerning research participants identities, experiences, beliefs, attitudes, and orientations toward a
range of phenomena. However, despite the proliferation of interview research
in qualitative applied linguistics, it has become equally apparent in recent years
that there is a profound inconsistency in how the interview has been and

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continues to be theorized. As Block (2000, p. 757) described it, there is a tendency in qualitative applied linguistics research that uses interview methods
to take research participants at their word, that is, to offer presentation of
data plus content analysis, but no problematization of the data themselves or
the respective roles of interviewers and interviewees (also see Johnston, 1997;
Pavlenko, 2007). Writing nearly 10 years later, in a major review of qualitative
research in language teaching, Richards (2009) was more resolute:
There is still work to be done to encourage yet deeper engagement with
methodological issues, especially where interviews are concerned. We
need to have more details of methodological and especially analytical
matters in published papers, and it would be satisfying to see the demise
of summaries [of interview data] amounting to no more than a couple
of sentences or a short paragraph. (p. 168)
As such comments suggest, it seems that qualitative applied linguistics researchers have engaged only partially and variably with debates concerning
their ideologies of interviewing (Briggs, 2007b), debates that have taken place
for some time in neighboring disciplines, particularly sociology, anthropology,
and (discursive) psychology (e.g., Briggs, 1986; Cicourel, 1964; Drew & Heritage,
1992; Gubrium & Holstein, 2002a; Holstein & Gubrium, 1995, 2003, 2004; Mishler,
1986; van den Berg, Wetherell, & Houtkoop-Steenstra, 2003). As a result, a usually
implicit and intuitive, or commonsensical, perspective on the interview remains
evident in many qualitative studies in applied linguistics that employ interview
methods (Block, 2000; Pavlenko, 2007; Richards, 2003, 2009).
In this article, I refer to this commonsensical conceptualization of the interview as an interview as research instrument perspective. It is contrasted with
an orientation that I call research interviews as social practice, in which the
research interview is explicitly conceptualized and analyzed as social action. I
employ this basic classificatory scheme as a heuristic to organize my discussion
of a selection of qualitative applied linguistics interview research published in
refereed journals over the past 5 years or so. I restrict the range of studies I
consider to qualitative studies that primarily use face-to-face semistructured
and unstructured interviews as one or the sole means of data generation in the
qualitative frameworks mentioned earlier.1 I note at the outset that my discussion does not concern the practicalities of conducting interviews: for example,
how to develop interview guides or protocols, what types of questions to ask and
when, effective techniques for developing rapport, interview ethics, computermediated communication interviewing, and so forth. There are many excellent
resources concerning these matters both in applied linguistics (e.g., Richards,
2003) and qualitative research more generally (e.g., Fontana & Prokos, 2007;
Gubrium & Holstein, 2002b; Kvale, 2007; Kvale & Brinkman, 2009; Spradley, 1979;
Warren, 2002; Warren & Karner, 2010). Instead, my focus in this review is on
the ideologies of interviewing evident in these studies, as they are realized by
the relative status that is ascribed to interview data (i.e., as direct reports or
accounts of phenomena), as well as how those data are described, analyzed,
and represented.

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CARTOGRAPHIES OF COMMUNICABILITY IN THE INTERVIEW SOCIETY

Although interviews have become a method of choice in a great deal of qualitative applied linguistics research, the scarcity of material that addresses
how they might be theorized is quite curious (Wooffitt & Widdicombe, 2006,
p. 32), especially since there is no shortage of methodologically oriented texts
concerning how interviews should be conducted. The comparative lack of consideration of the ontological, epistemological, and ideological assumptions underpinning interviews in applied linguistics and elsewhere has been traced to
their ubiquity in contemporary social life: as Briggs (1986) argued, because
the interview is an accepted speech event in our own . . . speech communities,
we take for granted that we know what it is and what it produces (p. 2; also
see Mishler, 1986, p. 23). Atkinson and Silverman (1997, pp. 304305) similarly
located the stubbornly persistent . . . special faith that many researchers place
in the interview to what they call the contemporary interview society, where
interviews are a pervasive feature of the discursive landscape: indeed are everywhere (Sarangi, 2003, p. 69). The contemporary uses of the interview have,
Atkinson and Silverman (1997, pp. 309310) maintained, give[n] researchers,
amid a diversity of methodological and epistemological positions, a spurious
sense of stability, authenticity, and security. This has led to
the widespread, sometimes uncritical, adoption of the interview, and
an unreflective endorsement of the core assumptions of the interview
society. . . .[whereby] unexamined models of the social actor and of the
research process [are implicitly introduced] into the particular styles
of interviewing that [researchers] recommend (Atkinson & Silverman,
1997, p. 310).
The core assumptions of the interview society can be explicated in terms
of what Briggs (2007a, 2007b) called the cartographies of communicability that
constitute particular conceptualizations of interviewing. A communicable cartography of interviewing is essentially a conceptual map consisting of certain
ideologies of language, communication, and the institution of the interview,
which are temporally and spatially located, and which produce certain (contestable) social roles, subject positions, agency, and social relations that allow
individuals in the interview society to make sense of interviews and interview
data, to understand what they are, and to interpret them as particular kinds of
social phenomena. Communicable cartographies of interviewing can also work
to naturalize and project themselves, to ensure their continued circulation.
Briggs (2007a) argued that three particular ideologies of language and communication have converged in a communicable cartography of interviewing
that has been naturalized in contemporary times: language as a transparent
medium, separation of the private from the public spheres, and a nostalgia
for the supposedly primordial face-to-face basis of communication and social
life. Interviews from this perspective magically appear to embody all three ideologies, producing discourse that seems to transform inner voices into public
discourse by constructing particular types of subjectivity and inducing subjects

QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

to reveal their inner voices (attitudes, beliefs, experiences, etc.) (pp. 553
554).
I use the label interviews as research instrument to refer to a similar communicable cartography of interviewing, as it is manifested in qualitative applied
linguistics. As a research instrument, interviews are theorized (often tacitly) as a
resource for investigating truths, facts, experience, beliefs, attitudes, and/or feelings of respondents. Language tends to be conceptualized in referential terms,
as a neutral medium that reflects or corresponds to objective or subjective
reality (Alvesson, 2003; Baker, 2002; Briggs, 1986; Holstein & Gubrium, 1995;
Richards, 2003; Roulston, 2010; Sarangi, 2003; Silverman, 2001). Interview data
are ontologically ascribed the status of reports of respondents biographical,
experiential, and psychological worlds, with the interview thus conceptualized
as the epistemological conduit to those worlds: the interviewer reveals what
really happened, or what participants actually felt through the technology
of the interview, with closer approximations of reality depending on the interviewers skill at developing rapport, for example, or not asking leading questions.
(Neo)positivist approaches such as survey or structured interviewing take the
interview as research instrument perspective (see Alvesson, 2003; Roulston,
2010), as do naturalistic (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), romantic (Alvesson, 2001),
or emotionalist (Silverman, 2001) approaches, such as those utilizing socalled open-ended or in-depth interview methods, which suggest that it is
possible. . .to unravel a deeper or more essential reality (van den Berg et al.,
2003, p. 3) than allowed by structured interviewing.
Clearly, interviews as social practice share with the interview as research instrument perspective an interest in generating research data for the purpose of
analysis, answering research questions, a concern with interview techniques,
and so forth. However, the former position departs from the latter by problematizing the assumptions that constitute the research instrument perspective, and
treating interviews themselves as topics for investigation (also see Sarangi, 2003;
see Table 1). In this respect, the research interview as social practice orientation
aligns with Holstein and Gubriums (1995, inter alia) well-known active interview.
In terms similar to Silverman (2001), Holstein and Gubrium (2003) contrasted
the active interview with conventional approaches by arguing that the latter
privilege the whats of the interview, that is, the interview content, whereas active interviews are interested in both the whats and hows, that is, the content and
the interactional [and] narrative procedures of knowledge production (p. 68).
Holstein and Gubrium argued that conceiving of the interview as a fundamentally
social encounter rather than a conduit for accessing information means that the
interview becomes a site of, and occasion for, producing reportable knowledge
(p. 68). Further, by activating the subject behind the respondent, the interviewee is transformed from a passive vessel of answers to someone who not
only holds facts and details of experience, but, in the very process of offering
them up for response, constructively adds to, takes away from, and transforms
the facts and details (p. 70). In this respect, bias and distortion, validity and
reliability, topics of great concern in (neo)positivist and naturalistic theories of
interview are transformed since the respondent can hardly spoil what he or
she is, in effect subjectively creating (p. 70; also see Briggs, 1986, pp. 2123).2

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Table 1. Contrasting conceptualizations of the research interview

Interview as research instrument
Status of
interview
Status of
interview
data

Voice

Bias

Analytic
approaches

Analytic
focus

Research interview as social

practice

A tool or resource for

A site or topic for investigation
collecting or gathering
itself.
information.
Data are reports, which reveal Data are accounts of truths,
truths and facts, and/or the
facts, attitudes, beliefs, interior,
attitudes, beliefs, and interior,
mental states, etc.,
mental states of self-disclosing
coconstructed between
respondents.
interviewer and interviewee.
Interviews give voice to
Voice is situationally
interviewees.
contingent and discursively
coconstructed between
interviewer and interviewee.
Interviewers must strive to
Reflexive recognition that data
obviate data contamination.
are collaboratively produced
(and analysis of how they are);
data cannot therefore be
contaminated.
Content or thematic analysis,
Data do not speak for
summaries of data, and/or
themselves; analysis centers on
straightforward quotation,
how meaning is negotiated,
either abridged or verbatim, i.e.,
knowledge is coconstructed,
the data speak for themselves.
and interview is locally
accomplished.
Product-oriented.
Process-oriented.
What.
What and how.

Analyzing not only the whats, or the product of the interview, but also the
hows, or the process involved in the coconstruction of meaning, has significant
implications for data analysis. In conventional approaches, analysis of interview
data often takes form in content or thematic analysis, systematically grouping
and summarizing the descriptions of experience produced by respondents by
common themes or content categories, such that their interpretive activity
is subordinated to the substance of what they report. In an active interview
analysis, by contrast, [t]he focus is as much on the assembly process as on
what is assembled (Holstein & Gubrium, 2003, p. 78; cf. Braun & Clarke, 2006).
A range of analytic approaches can be adopted for this undertaking but all in
some way account for the fundamental sociality of the interview.
INTERVIEWS AS RESEARCH INSTRUMENT IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
There is an impressive diversity of topics addressed by qualitative applied linguistics studies that conceptualize interviews as a research instrument. For this
reason, the discussion in this section is organized by the qualitative approach

QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

that authors indicated they adopted, using the following subheadings: ethnographic and case study research; narrative/life-history research; and a more
generic class of interview studies that were identified as qualitative, or were not
identified at all.
Ethnographic and Case Study Research
Interviews are frequently used in ethnography and case studies, employed in
tandem with methods such as participant observation and document analysis as
a means of developing in-depth understandings of phenomena through triangulation (by method and source) (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). In
this respect, it might come as a surprise that only a minority of the studies that
were reviewed here presented findings based on an evident synthesis of the
research methods employed. Among them was Vickerss (2007) ethnography
of the second language (L2) language socialization of an Indonesian electrical
engineering student into the practices of a community of student engineers.
Featuring a sophisticated design that included participant observation, interviews, document analysis, playback sessions of videorecorded team meetings,
and micro-analysis of face-to-face interaction, the study traced the development
of the focal students participation in project team meetings, using interview
data to provide important contextual information about the participants perspectives on the project and each other. In Rankin and Beckers (2006) action
research case study, observational data were similarly integrated with written
student and teacher reflections, stimulated recall sessions of videorecorded
classes, and interviews in a small-scale investigation of a German as a foreign
language teachers oral corrective feedback practices. Interviews in this study
were used to trace the long-term development of [the teachers] thinking about
his provision of the practice in question. In Creeses (2006) ethnographic study
of an English as a second language (ESL) teacher and a subject teacher who were
partnered in a secondary geography class, interviews were used to document
these teachers contrasting views of their pedagogical roles and responsibilities.
Having thus set the scene (p. 444), the two teachers views were then compared
in an analysis of their actions in the actual classroom.
More typical of the ethnographic and case study research that was reviewed
was the relative foregrounding of interviews from a larger ethnographic project,
with these data composing the majority of the data presented (in some cases,
the only data). As in the studies reviewed earlier, interviews were used most
often as a means of accessing and presenting participants beliefs, attitudes,
perceptions, and experiences. For example, in Mothas (2006) critical feminist
ethnography about the links between ESL and (neo)colonialism, data from interviews, conversations, and afternoon teas served as the primary record, used
to listen to voices that have traditionally been delegitimized within educational
research (p. 80), as four practicing teachers and the researcher discussed
monolingualism, assimilationism, and linguicism in public schools. Canagarajahs (2008) ethnography concerning the role of the family in processes of language shift in three Sri Lankan disaporic communities, used interviews to gain
an emic or insider perspective on how the community explains its language

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choice and attitudes (p. 148). Interviews also predominated in Golombek and
Jordans (2005) case study (data from reaction papers were provided, too, although it is not always clear which data came from which source). These data
were used to present the thoughts and beliefs of two Taiwanese preservice L2
English teachers during and following a poststructuralist pronunciation
pedagogy course, as they confronted such (language) ideologies as the native
speaker myth and worked to assert their right (p. 514) to teach English pronunciation. Similarly, interview data were supplemented by language autobiographies in Haddixs (2008) insightful study of two White, monolingual-English
teacher candidates in a sociolinguistics course. L. Taylors (2006) short-term
study of the experiences of a group of racially and ethnically diverse high school
ESL students in a Freirean-styled, antidiscrimination leadership camp (p. 520)
also relied heavily on interview data, as did K. King and Ganuzas (2005) ethnographic investigation into the national, ethnic, and linguistic identifications of
Chilean-Swedish transmigrant youth, as manifested in interview talk.
Narrative/Life-History Research
It is no surprise that interviews were the central method of data generation in
the studies that were reviewed, which focused on participant life histories and
narratives (see, e.g., Andrews, Squire, & Tamboukou, 2008; Benwell & Stokoe,
2006; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Gubrium & Holstein, 2008). Nor is it a surprise
that these studies investigated subject realities and life realities (Pavlenko,
2007), nor, for that matter, that the kinds of analyses undertaken were as varied
(and variable) as they were. Nevertheless, there was considerable methodological and analytic overlap between studies in this section and the previous one,
particularly those ethnographic and case studies that foregrounded interviews.
On the one hand, these overlaps are an artifact of the categories I have used
to organize this section, and the leakage (Trinh, 1989) between them. On the
other, they may serve as evidence of some slippage in terms of how ethnography, case study, and narrative research have been conceptualized in applied
linguistics: in fact, at times, the only way to discover whether a given study
was an ethnography, a case study, a narrative inquiry, life-history research, or a
phenomenological study, was by the terminology used to identify it. Even then,
these terms were at times used as if they were interchangeable (cf. Creswell,
1998; Hatch, 2002; Polkinghorne, 1995; Silverman, 2001).
An exception is Menard-Warwicks (2005) life-history study of two Central
American women and their contrasting educational experiences following their
immigration to the United States. Menard-Warwick used data from interviews
and classroom observations to represent the sociohistorically situated life trajectories (p. 171) of Brenda and Serafina as they attempted to balance Englishlanguage learning with family, work, scheduling difficulties, and U.S. immigration policy. Tsuis (2007) narrative inquiry concerning a Chinese EFL (English
as foreign language) learner and teachers negotiation of multiple conflicting
identities utilized a design more common to other narrative/life-history studies
reviewed, drawing on face-to-face interviews and diaries for Min-Fangs stories
about struggling to identify with the professional identity of communicative

QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

language teacher. Gao (2008) included some welcome methodological detail

concerning her (thematic) data analysis, although her decision to employ lifehistory interviews to investigate 14 Chinese students language-learning strategies is curious, given the topical focus, and the number (two) and length
(45 minutes) of the interviews. Nonetheless, the study generally succeeded in
its goal of capturing learners voices (p. 173), at least as those voices were represented in the study. Participant voices were also well-represented in Carroll,
Motha, and Price (2008), which analyzed narratives (written and spoken) from
two separate studies to examine how social structures and contexts can behave
simultaneously as powerfully tyrannizing regimes of truth and powerfully liberating imagined communities (p. 189). However, there is less detail than might
be expected about the procedures of the content and thematic analyses that
were undertaken, and little consideration of implications that the modalities of
the narrative data might have had for the analysis. A point of contrast here can
be found in Cheungs (2005) study of teachers narratives about their career
development, which provided a remarkable amount of information about the
interviews and data analytic procedures that were undertaken.
Qualitative Interview Research
The studies considered in this section were identified by their authors simply
as qualitative or were not identified at all; despite substantive differences between them, all used interviews as the primary method for generating empirical
data. Palfreyman (2005), for example, relied almost exclusively on interviews in
his important study about processes of Othering (cf. Said, 1978) among Turkish teachers and expatriate administrators at a Turkish universitys Englishlanguage center. B. King (2008) provided a comparatively robust analytic framework based on Sacks (1972) to consider the pervasive but little-investigated
problem of heteronormativity in L2 English education, using what appeared to
be a single group interview with three gay male Korean L2 learners for his dataset. In Baek and Damarin (2008), interviews were used to describe the complex
inner stories (p. 195) of seven female L2-English-speaking university students
from Korea and their experiences with computer-mediated communication in
the L2. Atay and Ece (2009) explore[d] the ideas (p. 21) and identity clash (p.
31) of Turkish preservice teachers of English through a rich display of quotes
from their 34 participants, although it was unclear whose voices belonged to
whom since quotes were not attributed to particular participants. In Sarkar and
Allens (2007) qualitative study of identity and language use in a community
of multilingual, multiethnic hip-hop artists in Montreal, interviews focused on
rappers use of mixed language and the links they perceive to their identities
as Quebec hip-hoppers (p. 122). In a related study, Pennycook (2007) used
interview data in his analysis of hip-hop in such countries as Malaysia, Korea,
and Tanzania, and studied the challenges these localized varieties posed to the
African American hip-hop ideology of keepin it real. Varghese and Johnston
(2007) indicated that the participants in their qualitative study of evangelical
Christian L2 English teachers were very articulate and very pleased to be
interviewed, and as a result, that the researchers had the impression that . . .

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the interviewees words could at one level . . . be taken as a reasonably accurate

record of what they actually thought (p. 13). Interviews were also used in K.
King and Fogles (2006) study of ways that parents discursively positioned themselves to justify their bilingual parenting practices and policies, with parents
quotes about these matters organized around common themes that emerged
from the data.

SUMMARY
As the review here suggests, qualitative research in applied linguistics that conceives of interviews as research instrument is remarkably diverse, in terms of
the topics addressed, the theoretical frameworks adopted, the research methods employed, and the ways that data and analyses are represented. Certainly,
these studies illustrate how common the interview as a methodological option in
qualitative applied linguistics has become. As well, they underscore the utility,
flexibility, and convenience of qualitative interviews for investigating an impressive array of matters of relevance to applied linguistics. At the same time, each
of these studies illustrates in different ways one or more of the features of the
communicable cartography of interview as research instrument described earlier. I alluded earlier to several of these features; here I elaborate briefly on four
of them: the status of interview data as reports, the obfuscation of power, the
interview as giving voice to participants, and matters concerning data analysis.
Status of Data as Reports
There is an evident propensity in the research discussed earlier to conceptualize
interview data as participant reports of objective or subjective reality, with a
generally exclusive focus on content, or the what of the interview. Perhaps
the clearest indication of the status ascribed to these data is in how they are
displayed: frequently as decontextualized, stand-alone quotes of respondents
answers, as if they were discrete speech events isolated from the stream of
social interaction in whichand for whichthey were produced (Wooffitt &
Widdicombe, 2006, p. 39). Even when interviewers are included in representations of data, there tends to be little analysis concerning their role in the
production of data. Both points are significant analytically, for, as a long line of
research in conversation analysis has demonstrated, answers are normatively
oriented to and designed for the questions that occasion them (Sacks, 1992;
Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 2007). In other words, interviewees answers are shaped by, and oriented to, the interactional context. This
[insight] . . . invites [researchers] to give serious consideration to the ways in
which the interviewers participation is significantly implicated in what the respondents end up saying, and how they say it (Wooffitt & Widdicombe, 2006, p.
56, my emphasis). This valuable analytic resource disappears, however, when
data are represented as direct reportsas if the interviewer were invisible
and consequently, a wide range of potentially important insights concerning the
data, analysis, and interpretations of a given study can be lost. For example,

QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

although Canagarajah (2008) provided important contextual information by

mentioning differences in religion, caste, and class between his participants and
him, there was no analysis of the impact this may have had on his interviews.
L. Taylor (2006), too, mentioned her own race (White), but did not consider
implications of this for her interviews or her findings, a curious omission given
the studys focus on race, and that many interviewees were youth of Color.
Although Menard-Warwick (2005) indicated that she made every effort to take
into account [her] own presence as an Anglo, Spanish-speaking, former teacher
(p. 170), she, too, was largely absent in her analysis of interview data. Similarly,
in my (Talmy, 2006) ethnographic study concerning the struggles of a group
of Micronesian students at a Hawaii high school, I failed to consider my raced
and placed (Blommaert, 2005) status as an adult White male researcher whose
first language is English, interviewing ESL youth of Color. The same can be said
of Palfreyman (2005), who inexplicably did not consider his own identity as a
British expatriate in a study of Othering between expatriates and Turks at a Turkish university; and Varghese and Johnston (2007), who, although clear that as
atheists their interpretations, findings, and conclusions will be colored by and
filtered through our subject positions (p. 13), were less informative concerning
the actual implications of this for their interviews with evangelical Christians. In
Golombek and Jordan (2005), one of the researchers was the teacher of the two
focal students, and apparently, was one of the interviewers, too; yet nothing was
discussed about this relationship or its potential effect on the interviews. The
same is true of Motha (2006), who was her focal participants course advisor,
university teacher, and practicum coordinator; and Chavez (2007), who was her
participants course supervisor, though she did briefly acknowledge (p. 185)
that this relationship may have had some relevance for her findings. This is not
to single out these studies as being unusual in any way; indeed, the neglect of the
role of the researcher/interviewer in coconstructing interview datawhatever
their relationship to the intervieweeis common across studies that conceive
of interviews as a research instrument.
Power
Relatedly, the interview is constituted by complex relations of power, which can
be differentially realized in many ways: who chooses whatand what notto
discuss; who asks what questions, when, and how; who is ratified to answer
them (and who is not); who determines when to terminate a line of questioning;
and so on. There are also other potentially important asymmetries that may be
less directly observable but equally relevant, if not more so, ranging from differences in institutional status, age, language expertise, social class, and more.
Analyses that conceive of interviews as providing access to what participants
think or believe, ascribe interview data the status of reports, or do not account
for the complex pragmatics of interview practices (Briggs, 2007a, p. 555) obscure such power imbalances by simply not attending to them. Additionally,
important power asymmetries can be enacted beyond the immediate interactional context of the interview, in terms of data representation, specifically in
what Bauman and Briggs (1990) have called entextualization, the process of

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rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production

[e.g., talk from an interview] into a unita textthat can be lifted out of its
interactional setting (p. 73) so that it can be recontextualized, that is, placed
into another context. Thus, as Briggs (2007a) noted: power lies not just in controlling how discourse unfolds in the context of its production but [in] gaining
control over its recontextualizationshaping how it draws on other discourses
and contexts and when, where, how, and by whom it will be subsequently used
(p. 562). Just as interviews as research instrument do not address power within
the interview itself, neither do they attend to power in terms of how those
data are entextualized, decontextualized, and subsequently recontextualized,
for example, as stand-alone quotes of what participants think.
Voice
A frequently cited rationale for adopting qualitative interview methods is that
they allow participants own voices to be heard rather than obscured, for
example, in summaries, tables, or statistics; indeed, participant voices were
communicated in resounding fashion in the studies reviewed earlier. However,
such a conception of voice carries with it a range of assumptions that may go
unexamined: for example, that a person speaks with a single voice; that voice
does, or at least can, given the right circumstance, express ones true self; and
that the researcher or interviewer plays a central role in creating the liberatory
conditions for this voice to be heard, by establishing trust, asking the right
questions, and not interrupting. All caveats concerning multiple, conflicting,
and contradictory identities notwithstanding, such an unproblematized notion
of voice suggests the existence of a unitary, coherent, and essential self that the
participant gives voice to. As Mazzei and Jackson (2009) sum up:
Qualitative researchers have recognized the dangerous assumptions
in trying to represent a single truth (seemingly articulated by a single
voice) and have therefore pluralized voice, intending to highlight the
polyvocal and multiple nature of voice. . .. This practice of more is
better has indeed highlighted the ways in which voices are not singular, yet the obsession for more full voices side-steps . . . the problem: these practices remain attached to notions of voice inherited from
metaphysicsvoice as present, stable, authentic, and self-reflective.
Voice is still there to search for, retrieve, and liberate. (pp. 12)
Data Analysis
All of the studies reviewed earlier analyzed their interview data using some
combination of content and thematic analysis, an approach to analysis that is
well-aligned with a conceptualization of the interview as a research instrument
(cf. Braun & Clarke, 2006).3 As one might expect for a collection of studies so
diverse, the type and quality of analyses were variable, ranging from sophisticated thematic analyses, to general summaries of the content of what participants said, to little or no provision of analytic comment at all. In her important

QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

review of autobiographic narrative research in applied linguistics, and with

clear relevance to the present discussion, Pavlenko (2007) noted that the key
advantage of content and thematic analyses is their sensitivity to recurrent
motifs salient in participants stories and thus to themes that are important
to L2 learners but [that] may not have been reflected in previous scholarship
(p. 166). This is indeed the case with each of the studies discussed here, from B.
Kings (2008) welcome discussion of heteronormativity in applied linguistics, to
Canagarajahs (2008) problematization of the pivotal role of family in language
maintenance, to the insights yielded by Menard-Warwicks (2005) memorable
life histories of Brenda and Serafina, to Sarkar and Allens (2007) significant
contribution to the growing literature on hybridity, globalization, and hip-hop.
However, in addition to the benefits that attend content and thematic analyses,
Pavlenko (2007) enumerates five of what she calls their major weaknesses:
The first is the lack of a theoretical premise, which makes it unclear
where conceptual categories come from and how they relate to each
other. The second is the lack of established procedure for matching
of instances to categories. The third is the overreliance on repeated
instances, which may lead analysts to overlook important events or
themes that do not occur repeatedly or do not fit into pre-established
schemes. The fourth is an exclusive focus on what is in the text, whereas
what is excluded may potentially be as or even more informative. The
fifth and perhaps the most problematic for applied linguistics is the
lack of attention to ways in which storytellers use language to interpret
experiences and position themselves as particular kinds of people. . ..
In other words, content analysis may result in a laundry list of observations, factors, or categories, illustrated by quotes from participants,
that misses the links between the categories, essentializes particular
descriptions, and fails to describe the larger picture where they may fit.
(pp. 1667)
Perhaps a sixth potential weakness concerns issues of theoretical
(in)compatibility, that is, when studies that are explicitly formulated with poststructuralist, social constructionist, and/or social practice theoretical frameworks adopt for their theory of interview a research instrument perspective.
There is, of course, always the possibility that a deliberate decision has been
made to do this; if that is the case, however, some meta-methodological discussion about that choice would be anticipated (see Roulston, 2010; Silverman,
2001).

RESEARCH INTERVIEWS AS SOCIAL PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

As mentioned earlier, studies that conceive of research interviews as social
practice treat the interview not as a resource for extracting data held within
a univocal respondent, but as a site for investigation itself. Rather than direct
reports, data are conceptualized as accounts of phenomena, jointly produced

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by interviewer and interviewee. Rather than a concern with researcher bias,

there is a fundamentally reflexive orientation to the collaborative character of
knowledge production and data generation. Rather than an exclusive focus on
interview content, or the what of the data, attention is directed both to the
what and how, that is, the content and the linguistic and/or interactional
resources used in coconstructing content and locally achieving the interview
as speech event. Taken together, these features constitute a communicable cartography of the interview as participation in social practice(s)the (partially)
routine activities through which people carry out (partially) shared goals based
on (partially) shared (conscious or unconscious) knowledge of the various roles
or positions people can fill [or do] in these activities (Gee, 2004, p. 33; also see
Giddens, 1984). A wide range of analytic approaches can be adopted for the
analysis of research interviews as social practice; among the most common are
various types of (critical) discourse analysis (see, e.g., Blommaert, 2005; Eggins,
2005; Fairclough, 2003; Gee, 2005; Johnstone, 2008; Schiffrin, Tannen, & Hamilton,
2001; cf. Wooffitt, 2005), narrative analysis (e.g., Andrews et al., 2008; Gubrium
& Holstein, 2008), conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992) especially work in institutional (Heritage, 2005) or applied (ten Have, 2007) conversation analysis
(see especially Drew & Heritage, 1992), membership categorization analysis
(Sacks, 1972, 1992; for work on interviews, see Baker, 2002, 2004), positioning
analysis (e.g., Bamberg, 2000; Harre & van Langenhove, 1992), and interactional
sociolinguistics (e.g., Gumperz, 1982), to name but a few. Depending on the
design of a study and its scope, research questions, and theoretical framework, analytic focus can range from the comparatively micro (e.g., sequential
organization, recipient design, discourse markers, contextualization cues, evidentiality, category-bound activities), to the macro (e.g., narrative structure,
membership categorization devices, negotiation of identities, power relations,
intertextuality, interdiscursivity), to more general orientations that engage less
with the how than the what, but still challenge the conception of interviews
as a conduit into what people really think, know, or believe. In other words, to
presume that analysis of interviews as social practice necessarily involves some
form of micro-analysis, for example, would be as much a mistake as presuming
that it does not. Instead, the primary issue for a social practice analysis entails
an ontological and epistemological shift, by problematizing the ideologies that
constitute the cartography of communicability that is referred to earlier as
interviews as research instrument.4
To demonstrate implications of this discussion, I consider in the remainder
of this section several qualitative applied linguistics studies that conceive of the
research interview as social practice. Each study uses interviews for a different
purpose, and each analyzes the data generated from them using a different
approach, ranging from micro-analysis to more general orientations that problematize the status of the interview, the data, and the role of the interviewer.
My aim in discussing these studies is not to hold them up as exemplars of any
kind, but to provide some illustrative examples of this particular conception of
the research interview.
Liebscher and Dailey-OCains (2009) qualitative study of language attitudes
provides a useful entry point for this discussion. In terms that parallel the

QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

different conceptualizations of the interview referred to above, Liebscher and

Dailey-OCain identified three different approaches taken in the analysis of qualitative data on language attitudes, which are typically drawn from interviews:
a content-based approach (pp. 197198), which aligns with the interview as
research instrument perspective; and two alternatives, turn-internal semantic and pragmatic approaches (pp. 198199) and interactional approaches
(pp. 199201), which can be situated under the rubric of research interview
as social practice. The authors make a strong case for integrating these three
levels of analysis, drawing on interviews they conducted with western Germans who had moved to Saxony and German e migres in Canada, concerning
attitudes about the Saxon dialect. Using an analytic framework that combined
interactional sociolinguistics, positioning analysis, and critical discourse analysis, they showed not only that there was, for western Germans, a stigma
associated with the Saxon dialect, but also how it was interactionally worked up
among focus group participants. The authors also demonstrated the comparative nonsalience of the stigma among German e migres in Canada, suggesting
that it was more important for these participants to index a common ground
in the German language than to mark differences based on regional variation.
As a result, the interviews themselves became central analytic sites, where
participants not only talked about language attitudes but also produced them
with one another and the researcher(s) in the interactions that constituted the
interviews.
Johnsons (2006) study of the construction and negotiation of teacher identity
in a research interview uniquely foregrounds the interview as site for knowledge production. The study posed the following research question: Can a
poststructural approach to critical reflection encourage teachers to become
more critical? (p. 215). Rather than providing a thematic analysis based on
the teachers reports about her reflections on teaching, whether they were
critical or not, and if, as a result, she became more or less critical, Johnson
investigated how the identities of a good teacher and a good research participant became salient in her interviews. Drawing on conversation analysis
and membership categorization analysis, she described in substantive detail
the ways that the teacher portrayed herself as doing reflective practice from a
critical perspective (p. 217, my emphasis), as well as how she oriented to being
an excellent interviewee, in the terms laid out by the researcher/interviewer
(p. 219). Consequently, the answer to her research question is based on a notably
reflexive analysis: that the interviewer primarily position[ed] the interviewee
through the assignation of a teacher as excellent reflective practitioner category [with that] option . . . taken up by the teacher . . . in the ensuing [interview]
(p. 232).
Prior (in press) utilizes discursive psychology (e.g., Edwards & Potter, 1992,
2005) and narrative analysis to examine two versions of the same emotionally charged narrative told on two separate occasions by Trang, a multilingual,
multiethnic adult immigrant for whom English was an L2. From an interview
as research instrument perspective, such a study might be concerned with
issues related to reliability, for example, the degree of consonance between
Trangs two tellings of a frustrating experience at a bank in Canada, whether

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they diverged and if so, in what ways, and so forth, with the similarities and
differences pointing to how truthful Trang was, how dependable his memory was, and whether his story was to be believed as a report of what really happened. However, Prior located important differences between the two
narrative versions, characterizing them not as an indication of inconsistency
but as evidence that the tellings served substantially different rhetorical purposes in the different contextual circumstances of the two interviews (also
see Pavlenko, 2007). The analysis is, once again, fundamentally reflexive, as
it accounts not only for the content of the two versions of the bank narrative but also the interactional and interpersonal circumstances of their local
production.
Campbell and Roberts (2007) continue a long line of work by Gumperz and
associates (e.g., Roberts, Davies, & Jupp, 1992) concerning interethnic communication in workplace encounters. The article examined the variable performance of White and of Color British born applicants versus born abroad
applicants in job interviews, accounting for the comparatively unsuccessful performance of the latter group in terms of their failure to synthesize what the
authors called personal and institutional discourses in the job interview. The
interview data were subjected to a methodologically eclectic discourse analysis, as the authors displayed differences in how both groups of applicants
negotiated the interview, although it is not always clear what role the interviewer played in coconstructing successful and unsuccessful interview performances. However, one concern that stood out in the study, given the analysis
of the job interview data, is what emerges as a central analytic inconsistency:
the conceptualization of the status of a secondary stream of data used from
stimulated recall interviews. In contrast to the job interview data, the stimulated recall data were taken at face value, as accurate representations of what
participants were really thinking in the job interviews; that is, the stimulated
recall interviews were treated as research instruments, in contrast to the job
interviews. Unfortunately, the authors did not comment upon this apparent
tension, leaving one to wonder whether it was a deliberate analytic move or
not.
Finally, Hawkins (2005) provides a good example of a study that engages
less with the how than the what of her interviews, but still problematizes
the ideologies that constitute the communicable cartography of interview as
research instrument (also see Block, 2000). This is likely due, at least in part, to
the fact that her interview participants were young children. Stating at one
point that what was missing in her previous research on young childrens
school-based language and literacy development was their voices and opinions
(p. 67), Hawkins and her research collaborator devised several ways of including them, one of which involved interviewing. The analysis of these data connects the contrasting patterns of communication and school engagement of two
kindergarten boys: interactional patterns that were observed in classrooms are
shown to be recontextualized and repeated in the interviews themselves. The
analytic focus on how these boys participated in the interviews thus served as
an important secondary source of data for Hawkins larger argument about their
differing ways of participating in school.

QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

CONCLUSION
It may appear from the preceding discussion that I am advancing the position
that qualitative applied linguists using interview methods should theorize them
as social practice. That is not the case. Studies that adopt (neo)positivist or naturalistic/romantic theoretical frameworks, for example, need not conceptualize
research interviews as social practice, though I believe there are clear advantages if they do. Rather, my goal is to call for greater attention to the theories
of interview that all qualitative applied linguistics studies adopt, to highlight
the communicable cartography of interviewing that has been naturalized in the
interview society, and to raise questions about it so that the ideologies of
language, communication, and the interview that constitute it are not imported
into qualitative applied linguistics studies, at least without due consideration. As
Briggs (2007a) argued, when interviews are not adequately theorized, and ideologies of interviewing go unexamined, interviews largely remain black boxes
. . . technologies so widely accepted that [researchers] can just feed in questions
and get quotations for [their] publications without worrying about the complex
pragmatics that make them work. Our own assimilation of these ideologies [can]
thus limit . . . the ways we interview and reflect on our own and other peoples
interviews (p. 555). In this respect, I would suggest that there is considerable need for heightened reflexivity about the interview methods that applied
linguistics researchers use in their studies, on the role of the interviewer in
occasioning interview answers, on the subject behind the interviewee, on the
status ascribed to interview data, and on how those data are analyzed and represented, regardless of whether one opts to conceive of interviews as research
instrument, or research interviews as participation in social practices.

NOTES
1 Due to space constraints, I do not consider in this article experimental studies that
incorporate qualitative interviews. There is a great deal that could (and should) be
said about this important stream of mixed methods research. However, although I
must side-step the discussion, I will state that these studies tend to adopt a theory
of interviewas research instrumentthat aligns well with the (e.g., [neo]positivist)
theoretical frameworks of the larger studies in which the interviews are used. At the
same time, I do believe that quantitative researchers, like their qualitative colleagues,
would do well to work toward greater reflexivity concerning the ontological, epistemological, and ideological assumptions guiding their decisions to use interviews, the
status they ascribe to interview data, and the claims they make based on this particular
research method.
2 Holstein & Gubrium (2003) elaborate:
When the interview is viewed as a dynamic, meaning making occasion . . .
different criteria [regarding reliability and validity] apply. The focus is on
how meaning is constructed, the circumstances of construction, and the
meaningful linkages that are assembled. . .. While interest in the content of
answers persists, it is primarily in how and what the subject/respondent, in
collaboration with an equally active interviewer, produces and conveys about
the subject/respondents experience under the interpretive circumstances at
hand. One cannot expect answers on one occasion to replicate those on

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another because they emerge from difference circumstances of production.

Similarly, the validity of answers derives not from their correspondence to
meanings held within the respondent, but from their ability to convey situated
experiential realities in terms that are locally comprehensible. (p. 71)
3 However, it was indicated in several studies that some form of discourse analysis
had in fact been undertaken. For example, Haddix (2008, p. 261) and Miller (2007,
p. 152) stated that they used Gees approach for analysis; Golombek & Jordan
(2005, p. 519) mentioned Fairclough; while L. Taylor (2006, p. 526) referred generically to discourse analysis. K. King & Ganuza (2005) mentioned Prestons (1994)
content-oriented discourse analysis, but it is not clear what this involved, how it
was done, or what analytic benefit it provided. Hayes (2005) provided a sophisticated
theoretical discussion about the role of the researcher in coconstructing interview
data, but did not, unfortunately, apply these insights to his analysis. B. King (2008) attempted to use Sacks (1972) membership categorization analysis, but was ultimately
unsuccessful in his attempt at following through. Only Varghese & Johnston (2007)
actually delivered on a Bakhtinian analysis, although it is minimal enough that it is
ultimately subordinated to the content analysis featured in the study. See Antaki,
Billig, Edwards, & Potter (2003); Burman (2004); and S. Taylor (2001) for more on
criteria that can be used to determine what constitutes a discourse analysis.
4 An excellent discussion and useful set of guidelines for undertaking an analysis of
qualitative applied linguistics interviews as social practice can be found in Richards
(2003, pp. 79103).
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AUTHOR NOTE
My thanks to Keith Richards, Charlene Polio, and the anonymous reviewers
for comments on earlier drafts of this article, and to Gabi Kasper, who several
years ago introduced me to many of these ideas. All errors in the article are my
responsibility.