“There's a Certain Slant of Light”: The Experience of Discovery in Qualitative Interviewing

Abstract

Perception, meaning, and experience, often expressed in the writing and interpretation of poetry, are important parts of human life. Qualitative interviewing, when it acknowledges and capitalizes on the presence of human interviewers and of so-called interviewer effects, opens itself to capturing and comprehending such phenomena as perception, meaning, and experience. Such interviewing is a creative process in which the interactions) and conversation(s) of interviewer and respondent produce statements and formulations, rather than merely drawing such constructs from the mind of the respondent. Examination of an interview in which the author was respondent shows how interview dialogue facilitated his formulation of a narrative account of part of his intellectual development. This example is used to illustrate how interviewing can facilitate the exploration of one's personal world(s) and how interviewers discover that their constructions and formulations of the world differ from those of their respondents. In the final analysis, it is the subjectivity of the qualitative interview, its being influenced by and affecting both interviewer and respondent, that makes discovery possible in qualitative research.