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and read publications like those written by the laureates for lay audiences. She prepared a
summary of each laureate’s career and his work as a preparation for the interview.
We usually prepare our interviews in a similar way. As a rule we use the following sources to
get information about the scientists work:
- Research proposals and research reports;
- Publication lists from publication databases like the Science Citation Index; and increasingly in
the last years
- Information obtained from the internet about research projects, methods and equipment of the
group and the like.
In the following quotation, the interviewer used information about collaboration from the
interviewee’s research proposal:
Q: I read in the proposal about the project B1 that there has been already a collaboration, which means
already in 1985 …
A: Oh, yes. Look, I forgot that.
Q: I assume the methods belonged to the group X, namely UV-laser.
A: Right, yes, yes. I completely forgot this; we had a lot of publications there, too. There was a postdoc …
We worked well together, liked each other, he was a very good scientist and was interested in our approach. I
did a lot of work together with him. He was postdoc in the group X, and that is why I had access to the
physics department to some very exotic laser that does not exist even in group X. It was necessary to
convince a very strange laser physicist that our biological dirt is worth an investigation. In this case X and his
postdoc helped me very much … This was the ignition for one of our most successful projects that led us
very far, also internationally.
The interviewed biologist provided detailed information about a research collaboration he had
already forgotten. It was all in his head, but the description had to be triggered by a question, and
the question required prior information.
3.2 Creating an ‘ad hoc- pidgin’
One important aspect of any qualitative interview is that it must be conducted in a language
that enables the investigator to obtain relevant information. Consequently, the language must be
comprehensible for both the interviewer and the interviewee, and must facilitate the description
of the interviewee’s world. If the world is sufficiently remote from the everyday world that can
be assumed to be shared by interviewer and interviewee, the emerging language can be regarded
as an ‘ad-hoc – pidgin’. We borrow the term pidgin from Galison who used the metaphor of
pidgins and creoles to explain the stabilisation of interdisciplinary collaborations by the gradual
emergence of a simplified language containing terms from both intersecting worlds (Galison
1996). It seems useful because in a sociological interview, a similar situation occurs. Interviewee
and interviewer attempt to accomplish an ad hoc-collaboration for producing information the
interviewer needs. In this collaboration, two worlds – the world of sociological investigation and
the scientist’s work world – intersect, and in order to communicate between the two worlds, a
common language must be constructed. The interviewer is suggesting such a language by using
concepts from the scientist’s world (which she obtained during her preparation, see 3.1) and
Convention