listening to other interviewers: GoraN Cars example
These clips come from an interview that John Forester conducted with Goran Cars, a Swedish planner who specializes in conflict resolution. They provide good examples of how an interviewer can help a practitioner tell a story full of characters and action.
Segment #1: getting started
This audiotape starts at the point that John and Goran are ready to begin the interview. Notice that John transitions into the interview by reminding Goran about how this material will be used and emphasizes that he (Goran) will have the chance to review and edit out sensitive statements before anyone besides John and the transcriptionist sees it. This creates safety for Goran to talk more candidly. John then asks for a short summary of the case they will discuss and moves on to questions that "set the scene." If you imagine the script for a play, John's questions -- about where the town is located and what it is like -- draw out the equivalent of the initial description of the scene. He then moves on to the core of the interview: "What was the issue? How did you get involved?"
Segment #2: getting to the details of practice
We begin this segment by again listening to John ask Goran how he got involved in this case. Notice that Goran's first answer continues to set the stage -- he talks about the situation that led to his involvement and hints about the other actors in general terms ("the municipality," "stakeholders"), but he doesn't yet let us see any action or specific characters. As we've noted elsewhere, our interviewees don't know what kind of story we want; we have to help them. So after a couple short questions to go back and clarify the "scene," John asks again: "So how did you get involved?" And he signals the kind of answer he's looking for by adding, "The phone rang?" Goran then continues in this vein, "The phone rang, saying ...." In the back and forth that follows, John continues to prompt Goren for the kind of story he wants: "Who called?" "What did he want? What was your conversation with him?" Notice that sometimes these prompts aren't exactly questions, but rather repetition of something Goran said, with non-verbal encouragement to elaborate.
Segment #3: adding complexity; dealing with non-verbal answers
This segment picks up a few minutes after the end of last segment. John has been drawing out a description of the different stakeholder groups and their interests. Now he returns to the story's action: "So what did you do?" By now, Goran has understood the kind of story John is looking for, and his responses are detailed and concrete. John draws out the story's complexity by asking questions like: "Did you believe that [what the politicians said]?" "How was it that you trusted the mayor?" He also asks clarifying questions, "So my understanding is that the mayor was very direct and so you came to terms." This allows Goran to clarify and provide a more complex answer.
John continues to repeat these kinds of questions as the interview progress: He asks again and again: "So what did you do?" "How did you do it?" He continues to probe for complexity in the story: "Did you feel people always knew all the answers and were forthright and honest about all of that?" And when Goran says, "No, many of them were not honest," John asks for more: "In what way? "How could you see that?"
The segment also demonstrates a good solution to a common problem: the interviewee provides part of his answer with body language, facial expressions, or by pointing to an object in the room, without verbally articulating it in words. The problem, of course, physical expressions can't be recorded on audiotapes. In this case, Goran says, describing the mayor, "He started like this ..." John responds by providing a possible verbal description for the action: "He started squirming." This lets the interviewee agree or clarify. In this case, Goran responds, "Exactly," agreeing to language that we use in the edited profile.
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