Interviews as Activated Storytelling

Challenging the sanitized view of participants in standardized surveys, Interviews as Activated Storytelling contends that interviewing is a meaning-making process producing useful but context-sensitive knowledge. Through a series of case studies, the book illustrates that participants are not simply there for asking and answering, but inquire and respond in terms of attendant interests and social worlds. Interview interaction and interpretation must take these into account against standardization. In two parts, chapters explore how conditions of the interview process (contexts) and conceptions of interview participants (subjectivities) narratively inform and shape—activate—interviewing and its results. Together with the previously published book Crafting Ethnographic Fieldwork: Sites, Selves, and Social Worlds, insights into the full range of procedural issues in qualitative research are offered.

Amir B. Marvasti is Professor of Sociology at Penn State Altoona, USA. Amir’s research focuses on identity management in everyday encounters and institutional settings. Using a symbolic interactionist framework, he approaches culture, discourse, and social institutions as interrelated and ongoing practices that collectively shape the self in a social context. His empirical research in this area examines how people (e.g., the homeless) present themselves to others, particularly when required to explain their backgrounds and intentions; and how their self-presentations are related to whether they are helped or accepted by others. Extending his interest in identity management to the subfield of the sociology of emotions, his current research looks at how people narrate their emotions in ways that reinforce gender stereotypes.

Jaber F. Gubrium is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Missouri, USA. The working premise of his research program is that no system of social rules is robust enough to understand its everyday application. Areas of study informed by this are aging and the life course, health and illness, human service organizations, constructions of family, institutional selves, and narrative analysis. Applying a critical constructionism, the goal is to make visible the assemblages of meaning that rationalization erases. Centered on the comparative ethnography of human service settings, he continues to explore and document novelty and pattern in troubles/problems reflexivity within the framework of what Erving Goffman called the “interaction order” and in tandem with a concertedly local brand of Michel Foucault’s concept of “discursive practice.” Jay is also a founding and former editor of the Journal of Aging Studies.