Ethnographic Interviews

If an interview is intended to explore the participant’s ideas, values, beliefs, understanding, knowledge etc. then it needs to adopt an ethnographic approach:

“The guiding plan for research in this [ethnographic] tradition is to ask children to explain their ideas and then to listen carefully to their words in the verstehen tradition. It aims to be entirely value-free, as an anthropologist might try to be while examining the culture of an alien tribe. Probably the early work of Jean Piaget (1929), where he records young children's ideas about an animistic nature and a curiously moving 'watching' moon, first inspired this sort of exploration… ” (Solomon, 1993: 1-2)

Solomon, J. (1993). Four frames for a field. In P. J. Black & A. M. Lucas (Eds.), Children’s Informal Ideas in Science (pp. 1-19). London: Routledge.

Verstehen?

“The scientist who engages in erklären tries to make explanatory sense of the phenomenon by finding the laws that govern it, whereas the scientist who engages in verstehen tries to make empathetic sense of the phenomenon by looking for the perspective from which the phenomenon appears to be meaningful and appropriate.”

Bransen, J. (2001). Verstehen and erklären, philosophy of. In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. (pp. 16165-16170). Oxford: Elsevier Science Ltd.

Index of topics