Qualitative Interviewing

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Interviews are among the most widely used methodological tools across the humanities and the social sciences. In linguistics, interview data are elicited and analyzed for thematic content and for discourse construction in response to a variety of research purposes. This course will provide students theoretical understanding and hands-on familiarization with the design, conduct, and analysis of interviews of six types: ethnographic, narrative, phenomenological, grounded theory, life story, and case study. We will cover: · ontological and epistemological foundations of qualitative interviewing and different ways of theorizing the use of qualitative interviews in linguistics research · designing an interview study, designing a qualitative interview protocol · the ethics of doing interviews, positionality and power dynamics, and researcher reflexivity · interviews as a social practice · strategies for interviewing · methods for analyzing and representing interviews · interview data in English, other languages, and multilingual-translanguaged interviews · presentation of interview data in written reports Students will practice with each other so they can develop good interviewing abilities and plan for the co-constructed nature of interviews. Students will also get experience analyzing interview data using MAXQDA software, which handles non-Roman script languages best.