Ethnographic Interview Methods in Researching Language and Education

Abstract

Interviewing in the nineties has become a powerful form of communication in our society and in social scientific research. It is estimated that 90 percent of all social science research uses interview data (Briggs, 1992/1986). This review will provide a historical and current overview of the role of ethnographic interviews in language and education research. To successfully examine the role of interviews in language and education research it is imperative to understand the interview as an important tool of anthropologically grounded research. Ethnographic interviews are used by social scientists and educators today to get the informant’s or interviewee’s perspective on their beliefs, values, and understandings of life and other topics or cultural events. Interviews in language and education research are also seen as ‘an information-providing speech exchange in which some of the knowledge of the consultant is given to the interviewer’ Werner & Schoepfle (1987, p. 302). Erickson (1981) suggests that there are two main ways by which peoples’ cultural knowledge can be studied, the first is by asking them, and the second, by watching them. He distinguishes between the different approaches based primarily on asking, such as questionaires with their attendant technical problems involving possible sample and instrument bias, and formal and ‘friendly conversations’ , as defined for example by spradely (1979, pp. 3–55) and Erikson (1981, pp. 29–30).