Beyond performative talk: critical observations on the radical critique of reading interview data

Abstract

We centrally consider the question of what interview data can be used to 'say' through a dialogue with advocates of the 'radical critique' of interview studies. We propose that the critique has considerable utility in drawing attention to 'the social life of interviews' and the pervasiveness of notions of the 'romantic subject' to how researchers often approach interviews and their analyses, highlighting some of the implications of that position. However, we suggest that the radical critique simultaneously goes too far in respect of its reduction of interviews to narrative performance, and not far enough in terms of its own critical departure from core characteristics of the romantic subject. Here we consider how certain aspects of the conceptual imagery employed by proponents of the radical critique lead towards a dichotomisation between the experienced and the expressed, a concomitant retreat into discourse, and a tendency to conflate what interviews can be used to say with what can be said at interview. We explore how the radical critique might productively be built upon via more 'synthetic' forms of research engagement, outlining alternative modes of apprehending interview data through a further critical departure from the romantic subject. We suggest that such an approach helps researchers move beyond a sole engagement with questions of how data are constructed and produced and towards how such data might otherwise be used to speak about the social world beyond the social nexus that constitutes an interview encounter.

Working at a remove: continuous, collective, and configurative approaches to qualitative secondary analysis

“…And: can these data be used to speak beyond themselves? Such questions were shared and discussed through several research collaborations between the various authors, and they became central to the 2020 QSA project (Hughes et al 2020b ; see also Hughes J et al 2020a ) (Table 2 ).…”

“…This centrally involved a consideration of how the data from the original study could be understood as characteristic of the time, place, and conditions of their becoming. Accordingly, a key insight developed through the QSA was how, more than a decade after the original research, the distinction between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ gambling employed by researchers in the set-up of the study could be understood as expressive of a particular phase in the development of internet gambling and, more generally, in processes involving the growing pervasiveness of the internet into everyday life (Hughes et al 2020b ).…”

“…For instance, such engagements could be understood as at once expressive of broader cultural tropes relating to interviews as confessionals; social conditions in which opportunities to talk about problem internet gambling were curtailed; and discursive tensions playing out in policy contexts. Further, the interviews illustrated how participants reflexively negotiated the limits to the cultural stock of narratives relating to addiction, and how such narratives were both enabling and constraining in ways that were actively negotiated—casting light on more general debates concerning the character of interviewee participation (see also Hughes J et al 2020a ; Hughes et al 2020b ).…”

Contesting constructs and interrogating research methods: Re-analysis of qualitative data from a hospital-based case study of self-harm management and prevention practices

“…This paper will not seek to describe them or appraise them. However, we do engage with radical critiques of interviewing which contest the 'Romantic view' of interviews as meaningfully presenting and reflecting experiences from the 'real world' and participants' understanding of them (Hammersley, 2003, Willis, 2019, Whitaker and Atkinson, 2019, Atkinson, 2013, Hughes et al, 2020. As Whitaker and Atkinson maintain, this Romantic perspective simply "celebrates the exploration of 'experience', while implying -sometimes tacitly -that the task of qualitative research is to reproduce the informant's 'point of view''' (Whitaker and Atkinson, 2019).…”