Content area
Full Text
Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. S. (2005). Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
The back cover and preface of Qualitative Interviewing position the book clearly: This is an introductory, field-based guide for the "novice" qualitative researcher with little or no hands-on experience. One of my goals for the review was to ascertain the extent to which this positioning was in fact operationalized, and I feel confident in reporting that the authors have obtained their goal. The authors take a consistently enthusiastic view of interviewing as a data-gathering technique, indicating in the front of chapter 1 the vast array of questions and issues that may be examined with interviewing. They compare conducting qualitative interviewing to having "night-vision goggles" (p. vii) that enable examination of unseen, complex phenomena.
Herbert and Irene Rubin offer their extensive, decades-long field experience with "depth" interviewing by liberally punctuating factual points with examples from their own work. Their credibility is clear. What also appears clear is their genuine wish to help inexperienced interviewers avoid some common pitfalls, as they use both successful and unsuccessful examples. Throughout the book, there is an unmistakably normative tone. The authors charge the interviewer with responsibilities not enumerated often enough in interview-methodology texts, including honoring the experience of generating knowledge as building a reciprocal relationship, honoring interviewees with unfailingly respectful behavior toward them, reflecting on one's own biases and openly acknowledging their potential effect, and owning the emotional effect interviews might have on respondents as well as on the interviewer. Thus, this book seems to me to serve dual and related purposes: to offer nuts-and-bolts methodological assistance and to norm new researchers into best practices that will serve them not only in interviewing situations but in academic life as a whole.
There is a cogent flow to the chapters that represents a roughly chronological sequence of an interviewing-research project. In chapters 1 and 2, the Rubins offer readers their philosophy of science that serves as a conceptual grounding for the "how-to" remainder of the book. Chapters 3 and 4, detailing research design, are among the most nitty-gritty of all the chapters, but such grit is essential for novice researchers. Helping new researchers choose appropriate research questions and anticipate questions...