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Preface |
and assesses the complexities and debates that swirl around the IRB process and informed consent. Chapter 6 avoids a cookbook approach but discusses specific interviewing skills and techniques and links them to important issues in interviewing and qualitative research. The chapter stresses how to listen as well as how to ask questions. Chapter 7 explores interviewing as a relationship. It places that relationship within the context of major contemporary social issues that are often embedded in the interaction between interviewers and participants. The chapter also faces squarely the potential for confusing in-depth interviewing research with therapy, cautions readers about the complexities of rapport, and stresses equity as the necessary element in interviewing relationships. Chapter 8 discusses how to manage, work with, and share the data generated by indepth interviewing. It guides the reader through a step-by-step process of working with the extensive material that interviewers gather. The chapter presents two potential analytic processes: one leading to identifying themes that emerge from the interviewing material and the other leading to developing narrative profiles of participants’ experiences and the meaning they make of those experiences. Both are ways of sharing and discussing results of interviewing with a wider audience.
The Appendix presents two narrative profiles. These examples reveal the potential of interviewing both to tap the depth of life-and-death experiences and to explore the complexities and significances of everyday experience.
While proposing a phenomenological approach to in-depth interviewing, the book provides and discusses principles and methods that can be adapted to a range of interviewing approaches. Throughout the text I have provided examples from interviews done by colleagues, graduate students with whom I work, and from my own research that illustrate the issues under discussion. I try to maintain a balance between sharing my experience with in-depth interviewing so that a reader can use what he or she may, and giving enough explicit guidance so that a reader can successfully conceptualize and carry out a research project based on the approach described.
In addition, I describe a practice project that individuals, entire classes, or workshops can use to gain concrete experience with the method in a short amount of time. I also guide readers to ways to study, reflect upon, and assess their own interviewing practice.
My goal has been to write a text clear and practical enough to provide useful guidance about in-depth interviewing as a research method. At the same time my objective has been to connect that method to broad-
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er issues in qualitative research. To that end, I selectively refer readers to additional readings that lead to further consideration of methodological, ethical, and philosophical issues in interviewing and qualitative research. In addition, the Internet has become an important research tool, and I have pointed readers to relevant Internet resources that are now readily available. My hope is that the emphasis on principles in the guidance the book offers and the integration of broader issues in qualitative research will make the book useful to a wide range of researchers in education and the social sciences.
Aristotle (1976) said that virtuous and ethical behavior involves doing well, whatever we do. My further hope is that this book will guide interviewing researchers to a method that engages their minds, touches their hearts, and supports their doing good work.
Acknowledgments
One of the pleasures for me in the years since this book was first published has been the contact I have had with new researchers who have e-mailed and called to discuss their research projects.
Some of their names appear in Chapter 2. To all of them I express my appreciation for their interest in and work with the approach to research outlined in this book.
I am indebted to Ms. Julie Simpson, Manager of Research Conduct and Compliance Services of the Office of Sponsored Research and Service, University of New Hampshire, Durham. Throughout my exploration of the Institutional Review Board review process, Ms. Simpson has guided me on specific and general issues. While she is not responsible for any shortcomings in this area, her generous, informed, and thoughtful guidance led me to a better understanding of the IRB process.
Thank you to Margaret Burggren, Richard Clark, Atron Gentry, Farshid Hajir, Anne Herrington, Robert Maloy, Gareth Matthews, Heidi McKee, Barbara Morgan, and Robert Zussman, present and former colleagues and associates at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; to Larry Ludlow and Gerald Pine of Boston College; and Linda Shopes of the American Historical Association. Each offered me important direct or indirect support in this effort.
Throughout this work—thanks to the support of Linda Griffin, Ken Divoll, and my colleagues in the Secondary Teacher Education Program— I have had the research assistance of Frederick Asante-Somuah, an outstanding graduate student from Ghana. He has been meticulous in his efforts, good spirited, and talented in his command of the new electronic databases in our library. Thanks also to Linda Neas and Jennifer Goodheart for their timely support. I also wish to express my appreciation to the Interlibrary Loan Department, and to Stephen McGinty and Barbara Morgan, Reference Librarians of our W.E.B. Du Bois Library.
I am deeply appreciative of the efforts of doctoral candidates Tony Burgess and Nate Allen of George Washington University and Margaret Boyko, Roel Garcia, and Tom Telicki of the School of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst who read and gave me specific, thoughtful, and very useful feedback to Chapter 5.
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My wife, Linda, and son, Ethan, have once again contributed significantly to whatever strengths the book may have through their considered and talented editing.
Thank you to David Schwandt and Margaret Gorman of the Executive Leadership Program of George Washington University and to the officers of the New England Educational Research Organization (NEERO) who have offered me opportunities to present workshops on in-depth interviewing in which I have been able to clarify and test ideas in this book. I also want to express my continued gratitude to Daniel P. Schwartz for his teaching, which stays with me.
I deeply appreciate Teachers College Press’s support of this third edition and in particular the thoughtfulness of Jessica Balun, Susan Liddicoat, Nancy Power, Peter Sieger, and Shannon Waite.
While the above acknowledgment focuses on those to whom I am indebted for their support of this third edition, I do not want the publishing of a new edition of this book to mean the loss of attribution to family, friends, teachers, colleagues, associates, and graduate students whose early support has stayed with me as I have continued this work: Clifford Adelman, Theresa Barton, Sara Biondello, John Booss, Kathryn Charmaz, Richard Clark, Elizabeth Cohen, William Compagnone, Edward. W. Hughes Jr., Sarah Kuhn, Alice Levenson, Ruth Levenson, Sari and George Lipkin, Lawrence F. Locke, Robert Maloy, Lori Mestre, Linda Miller-Cleary, Judith H. Miller, Jane Nagle, James O’Donnell, Sally Rubinstein, Mary Bray Schatzkamer, Alex Seidman, Louis Seidman, Rachel Filene Seidman, Patricio Sullivan, Mark Tetrault, and John Wirt.
Since the last edition of this book, our daughter Rachel and son-in- law Benjamin Filene have brought into the world another avid listener to stories, their daughter Hazel, younger sister of Eliza. When asked what it meant to live well, Freud was reported to have said, “To work and love well.” In my continued and certainly imperfect attempt to merge the two, I dedicate this edition to our granddaughter, Hazel.
Introduction
How I Came to Interviewing
In my study at home, I have a picture of my grandfather, whom I never met, on the bookshelf. He was born sometime around 1870 and he died in the early 1940s. In the sepia photograph that I have, he is
a bearded man with sad eyes, wearing a worn jacket over a sweater and tie. His eyes look out at me no matter where I am in the room.
Whenever I asked my father about his father, he said his father was a religious man. “What did he do?” I would ask, and my father would say, “He studied.” I never got very much of his story. I know only that he was a religious man, that he studied, that he didn’t do much else, that his family was poor, and that he died of a heart attack running away from the Germans early in World War II.
My father was an immigrant from Russia. He came to this country with my mother in 1921. While I was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, and upon visits to my family home later, I asked my father about his experiences in Russia (my mother, also from Russia, died in 1963): What was it like to live there? How did he come to leave? I asked him about his family, about what it was like to be a child in Russia.
His reply, almost invariably, was, “Why do you want to know? We were poor. Everyone was poor. There was nothing there. America is wonderful. Why do you want to know about Russia?” My father died in 1989 and, although I have accumulated a few anecdotes about his days in Russia, I did not learn the story of his life there, and I never will.
After graduating from college, I earned an M.A.T. degree and taught English for 4½ years in every grade from 7 through 12. Perhaps it was as a teacher of English that I first came to see stories and the details of people’s lives as a way of knowing and understanding.
To suggest that stories are a way to knowledge and understanding may not seem scholarly. When I was earning my doctorate in education in the mid-1960s, the faculty in my graduate program in teacher education seemed almost totally committed to building knowledge in education through experimentation. My graduate experience was governed by a sense that research in education could be as scientific as it was in the natural and
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physical sciences. Experimentalists informed by behaviorism dominated my graduate experience in research. I remember sitting in an advanced educational psychology class. The professor was discussing conditioning as a basis for understanding learning. It was a class of about 60, but discussion was officially encouraged. I raised my hand and said something about humans being different from rats because people had language. I don’t remember exactly what the professor said in return, but it was not what I would call today a collaborative response.
That day brought to a culmination my feeling of being stifled and frustrated by behaviorism during the first year of my graduate study. Only of late have I come to appreciate a suggestion my doctoral advisor and mentor, Alfred Grommon, made to me: that I do a biography of one of the early presidents of the National Council of Teachers of English for my dissertation. At that time, I considered his suggestion well intended but somehow not connected to my interests. Now I realize that he may have been offering me a way out of the Procrustean bed of behaviorism and experimentalism that pervaded my graduate experience.
Despite my aversions, I did an experimental dissertation. I designed a study of the effects on students’ achievement motivation of teachers’ comments on their writing. I had different treatment groups; I established independent variables and dependent variables; I enlisted a group of English teachers in the field to carry out “the treatments” that I had designed on “the subjects.”
Nathan Gage’s (1963) Handbook of Research on Teaching had recently been published. In some respects it was treated as a bible in our graduate program. I remember reading and rereading, and developing mnemonic codes to help me remember the threats to validity and reliability described and analyzed in Campbell and Stanley’s (1963) chapter on “Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Design for Research in Teaching.”
While at the time I chafed under the heavy emphasis on experimentalism, I now respect how committed my graduate institution was to research in education. Despite my resistance to the approach then, I now realize how valuable and important it was for me to confront the assumptions of positivism and behaviorism that seemed to me to dominate the institution. In my thinking about both teaching and research, my professional career has been shaped by that confrontation. There were also, at the time, professors who provided an alternative point of view. They helped open my mind to exploring new intellectual paths, especially the impact of social and cultural forces on individual experience in education. In the end, my graduate school communicated
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a sense of imperative about research in education that has had a longlasting effect on me for which I am grateful.
As I continued my career in education after I earned my doctorate in 1967, I took a position that left me confused about research. I joined the English Department of the University of Washington as one of three faculty members in English education. I had surprisingly little contact with the College of Education as I began to face the pressures of publishing in my field. On some levels, I was estranged from my own dissertation because I had not really believed in its methodology, so I did not then and never have sought to publish an article based on it. That first and formative year, I did do some writing, but no research. I often wonder how I would have figured out my relationship to research if I had stayed at the University of Washington. Given my experimental experience, my discomfort with it, and my position as a teacher educator in a strong, conservative English department where the notion of research was that of literary scholarship, my research options at that time were not clear to me.
I stayed at the University of Washington only a year. I had a good position in an exceptionally strong department in a public university that was the pride of the Northwest; but I left in 1968 to become the assistant dean of the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst under the leadership of Dwight Allen. This is not the place to dwell at length on that part of the story (Frenzy at UMass, 1970; Resnik, 1972). It looms larger in my mind, I am sure, than in most others’. Suffice it to say that our goal reflected the times and our sense of them. Our objective was to reform professional education and to have our School of Education play a role in making society more equitable. I will always respect the idealism of those goals. In our inexperience and naiveté, we made many mistakes along the way—in and among some significant accomplishments. As the times changed, and our mistakes accumulated, a new administration was called for. I was a faculty member again after 6 intense years as an administrator. Although I learned much about higher education during my tenure as an administrator, I gained little new experience in doing research.
After my administrative years, I was fortunate enough to take a sabbatical in London with my family. I had the chance to do reading that would allow me to return responsibly to my teaching. In addition to reading works on the teaching of English, which I had been away from for 7 years, I read Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolution and thought about my experience with science and research as a gradu-
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ate student. I read that book just in time. When I got back to the States, references to “governing paradigms” in journal articles abounded.
Upon my return, I co-taught a course with Robert Woodbury on Leadership in Higher Education. A new faculty member by the name of David Schuman had joined our school in the area of higher education. Through my teaching in the Higher Education Program I came to know him. Of the many constitutive events that led me to interviewing as a research methodology, meeting and working with Schuman was the most significant. Because I had rejected the approach to research I had learned in graduate school and had not learned a new approach in my short time at Washington, or in the 6 years I was an administrator, I was, paradoxically, a relatively experienced faculty member searching for a research methodology.
Schuman was beginning to write a book based on interviewing research that he had done with Kenneth Dolbeare. Schuman’s book Policy Analysis, Education, and Everyday Life did not come out until 1982, but in the meantime he generously shared with Patrick Sullivan and me his methodological approach, which he called “phenomenological interviewing.” He also directed me to some of the readings he had done in coming to the type of interviewing research he and Dolbeare had done. I remember in particular his suggesting to me that I read William James’s (1947) Essays in Radical Empiricism and In a Pluralistic Universe, Sartre’s (1968) Search for a Method, Matson’s (1966) The Broken Image, and, most directly relevant, Alfred Schutz’s (1967) The Phenomenology of the Social World.
I was ready for what Schuman was generously willing to share. I remember the feeling that I would like to do interviewing as a research method. I remember thinking what a good way it was to learn about people and schools as I listened to Schuman and began to build in my mind upon what he was saying. Additionally, I had had experience with psychotherapy. Through that process, I learned to appreciate even further the importance of language and stories in a person’s life as ways toward knowing and understanding. That personal experience made me even more ready to consider interviewing as a research method.
Sullivan and I were co-teaching a course for community college teachers on critical issues in community college teaching. Sullivan, with his colleague, Judithe Speidel, had earlier done a documentary film on the Shakers (The Shaker Legacy, 1976), and we decided now to do a film on teaching in community colleges based on the interviewing method we had learned from Schuman. We received a grant from the Exxon Corporation to support our interviewing 25 community college teach-
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ers on how they came to teaching, what it was like for them, and what it meant to them.
The film was produced in 1982, and we then received a second grant from the National Institute of Education (NIE) to expand our interviewing to community college faculty in California and New York. The work continued to be a deeply satisfying way to do research. I loved talking with people about their work as faculty members and learning about community college education through the experience of those who taught there. We interviewed a total of 76 community college faculty and, through the efforts of Mary Bray Schatzkamer, 24 students to try to gain an understanding of what it was like to work and teach in a community college. That interviewing led to a draft of a manuscript called “What We Have Learned About In-Depth Interviewing” that was published as Chapter 14 of our Final Report to NIE (Seidman, Sullivan, & Schatzkamer, 1983) and a book on community college teaching called In the Words of the Faculty (Seidman, 1985).
While doing our research on community college faculty, Sullivan and I began to co-teach a graduate seminar, In-Depth Interviewing and Issues in Qualitative Work. I continue to teach that seminar and to do interviewing research.
Interviewing the community college teachers was the first research I had done that was neither literary nor experimental. I had finally found a way to do “empirical” work that was emotionally and intellectually satisfying. In spite of problems and complications everywhere in the research process, from conceiving the idea and contacting participants to writing up the results of 3 years of interviewing, this kind of work was and continues to be deeply satisfying for me. It is hard and sometimes draining, but I have never lost the feeling that it is a privilege to gather the stories of people through interviewing and to come to understand their experience through their stories. Sharing those stories through developing profiles of the people I had interviewed in their own words and making thematic connections among their experiences proved to be a fruitful way of working with the material and of writing about what I had learned. A good deal of what follows is an attempt to describe and explain the roots of the intellectual and emotional pleasure I have gained from interviewing as a research method in education.
One final introductory note: Although this book concentrates on in-depth interviewing as a method of research in education, I am not proposing it as the sole, or the best, method of doing research. Some scholars argue that having multiple sources of data is one of the intrinsic