Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: With this article, we want to discuss a methodological problem central to many empirical investigations, namely the question to what extent investigators must be informed about their subjects’ practices, and how that knowledge can be acquired. We argue that some social settings, among them the professions, are characterised by their reliance on knowledge that is being acquired by a specific external training process. This puts the investigator at a principal disadvantage, because she cannot acquire all knowledge that is necessary to understand the subjects’ practices. Using our research in the sociology of science as an example, we discuss three reasons why qualitative interviews should be conducted in a scientifically informed manner: the necessity to take into account epistemic conditions of action in sociological explanations; the necessity to ‘operationalise’ the research questions; and the necessity to achieve the required depth in qualitative interviewing. In our attempts to conduct ‘informed interviewing’, we encountered three basic tasks: preparing the interview by acquiring scientific knowledge, preparing and suggesting a language for communication (an ad-hoc pidgin), and negotiating a level of scientific understanding in the introductory sequence of the interview. We make suggestions on how to solve these tasks, and discuss limitations of the approach of informed interviewing.