Accounting for Trouble: Identity Negotiations in Qualitative Interviews with Alcoholics

Abstract

This article combines a narrative approach on life histories, inspired by Paul Ricoeur, with the symbolic interactionist approaches of George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman. It focuses on “negotiations” in qualitative interviews with alcoholics, that is, narrative sequences in which the interviewee's line comes into conflict with the line of the interviewer. From a larger study of drinking careers among alcoholics in Copenhagen, two interviews are singled out for a more detailed analysis. The two interviewees did not live up to the (implicit) expectations of the study: the presumptions (a) that persons contacted at institutions for heavily addicted alcoholics do indeed identify themselves as alcoholics and (b) that alcoholics are interested in structuring their life histories according to the development of their drinking problems. By struggling to defend an alternative identity for themselves than the one the interviewer had in readiness for them, the interviewees laid bare the (problematic) therapeutic framework of the study.