Using Frameworks of Social Desirability to Teach Subjectivity in Interviews

Abstract

Qualitative methods courses lack tools for teaching students how to capture and analyze the nuanced ways participant subjectivity shows up in interviews. This article responds to the call for greater depth in qualitative methods instruction by offering teachers a series of discussion questions and an in-class worksheet that will help students more deeply probe and understand their data. These practical in-class tools leverage one theoretical lens that we find is well suited for unpacking participant subjectivity: social desirability. In this article, we present four speculative questions for instructors and students to more fully consider interviewees’ working frameworks: (1) What does your respondent consider a sensitive subject? (2) What does your respondent perceive to be norms of socially desirability? (3) Which audiences are the target audiences for your respondent’s presentation of self? and (4) How do you think your respondent’s relationship to the interview context influenced the account created during the interview?