How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-level Public Culture

Abstract

Recent debates about qualitative methods have discussed the relative limitations and contributions of interviews in comparison to surveys and participant observation. These discussions have rarely considered how ethnographers themselves use interviews as part of their work. We suggest that Lizardo’s discussion of three modes of culture (declarative, nondeclarative, and public) help us to understand the separate contributions of observation and interviews, with ethnographic interviews an especially helpful means of accessing different cultural modes. We also argue that Lizardo’s conception of public culture should be divided into meso- and macrolevels and that this division helps to show the differing contributions of interviews within and without an ethnographic context. Developing our argument with data from the second author’s ethnographic research and analysis of other scholars’ ethnographies, we show how research that uses ethnographic interviews can help sociologists better understand how these four cultural modes interact.