Ethnographic Interviewing

This workshop will expose participants to the principles and techniques of ethnographic interviewing, a method distinguished by its ability to yield contextually rich, meaningful data across a wide variety of settings. Indeed, ethnographic interviews are designed to elucidate the connections between features of community, cultural, and organizational environments, on the one hand, and the meanings that interviewees assign to and derive from these environments, on the other. Accordingly, techniques for collecting ethnographic interviews—including designing interview schedules, locating key informants, and establishing communicative competency and rapport—are geared toward understanding how interviewees themselves make sense of and negotiate their social environments. During the analysis stage, interviewees' interpretations are put into dialogue with the interpretations of the researcher, a strategy that recalibrates common approaches to establishing research validity and rigor.