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negotiating the level of communication during the interview in order to be treated as an
informed layperson by the interviewee.
How the first tasks can be solved depends on the social setting that is to be studied. We think
that the arguments for and against informed interviewing, as well as the tasks we described, are
generalisable. Informed observation is a very basic approach, and the problems we have
discussed occur not only in science studies, but whenever the acquisition of knowledge that is
used in a social setting takes place outside that setting, as is for example the case with
professions and elite sports. Strategies that can be generalised need to be developed in a joint
discussion of sociologists studying social settings of that kind.
We have encountered several limitations to our approach of informed qualitative
interviewing. One limitation is produced by specific fields like mathematics or theoretical
physics. While it was usually possible for us to understand the problems and strategies of
experimental research, we couldn’t achieve a similar simplified understanding of the practices of
mathematics and theoretical physics. Apparently, some fields can be studied only by native
observation. This should also be the case wherever tacit knowledge plays a significant role for
understanding the practices of a social setting.
A second limitation occurs if comparative research across several fields is conducted. In this
case, the sociologist, who of course has the prime task of preparing the investigation
sociologically, is endangered by information overload. There are limits to a scientific preparation
when one has to interview a molecular biologist on Monday, a solid state physicist on Tuesday,
an electrical engineer on Wednesday, and a physical chemist on Thursday. However, this
problem can be coped with if it is acknowledged that qualitative interviewing is no ‘quick’ (‘and
dirty’) method but takes at least as much time as a solid ethnographic observation.
A third limitation is that informed interviewing cannot be extended to the background of
scientific work that is acquired by systematic scientific education, and which often remains
hidden in scientific work. This principal limitation marks a difference to studies of many other
social groups. There is a kind of knowledge that is implicitly present and partially communicated
but had been acquired by ways that are qualitatively different from the practices that are
currently observed, and are located outside the field under study. It is not always tacit knowledge
but sometimes knowledge that is so elementary and evident for scientists that it is not
communicated. While ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews are well equipped to
identify the cultural taken-for-granted assumptions in many social settings, it is not clear to what
extent we can identify the scientific taken-for granted assumptions of scientists unless they are
challenged by the scientists themselves.
With regard to identifying taken-for-granted assumptions, we would like to come back to a
point that has been argued in the context of ethnographic methodology. Yes, there is the serious
danger of not obtaining certain information in an informed interview because it is informed. The
interviewee will form assumptions about the interviewer, and about what the interviewer already
knows. Therefore, informed interviewing increases the danger of not being told something that
should be told because your interviewee thinks you already know it. This can be partly helped by
Convention