Purpose: This paper contributes to a dialogue about the psychoanalytic concept of free association and its application in the context of qualitative research interviewing. In doing so, it also adds to wider discussion regarding the relationship between clinical psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy and qualitative research.…

Post qualitative inquiry has called for method-less research and warned against the incommensurability of the use of systematic research methods with poststructural and new materialist theories. This essay offers a counterpoint to the incommensurability argument by presenting four examples of studies informed by poststructural and new materialist…

It is now half a century since Joey explained to Paul Willis: 'Vandalising […] that's the opposite of boredom -- excitement, defying the law', one of many similar comments subsequently recorded in "Learning to Labour" (34). The book rapidly became an academic best-seller, and has since become an academic 'national treasure'. But, before…

Issues related to modern and post-modern approaches to career assessment and counseling are evident in the literature, as are ideas on how to build on and combine techniques. Although Holland's theoretical interventions can appear to conflict with career construction counseling due to their bases in modern and post-modern philosophy, respectively,…

Establishing and building rapport is a crucial aspect of research interviews with children and families. With interviews increasingly conducted via online platforms, such as Teams and Zoom, researchers are challenged to reflect on relational aspects, such as building rapport, when using this medium and how approaches may need to be nuanced. This…

Recent debates about qualitative methods have discussed the relative limitations and contributions of interviews in comparison to surveys and participant observation. These discussions have rarely considered how ethnographers themselves use interviews as part of their work. We suggest that Lizardo's discussion of three modes of culture…

In Goffman's terms, qualitative interviews are social encounters with their own realities. Hence, the 'situational critique' holds that interviews cannot produce knowledge about the world beyond these encounters, and that other methods, ethnography in particular, render lived life more accurately. The situational critique cannot be dismissed; yet…

As library and information science scholars, we know that context matters in research because we study how various populations look for information. The information-seeking behaviors of creative people, however, are something of a blank spot in our scholarly literature. Studies of creative writers are especially rare. This study used writers'…

This article examines an important and thorny problem in interview research: How to assess whether what people say motivated their actions actually did so? We ask three questions: What specific challenges are at play? How have researchers addressed them? And how should those strategies be evaluated? We argue that such research faces at least five…

Ethnographic and interview research have made significant contributions to cumulative social science and influenced the public conversation around important social issues. However, debates rage over whether the standards of positivistic social science can or should be used to judge the rigor of interpretive methods. I begin this essay by briefly…

Constructive changes in the practice of investigative interviewing have emerged as a direct result of an unprecedented and robust collaboration between behavioral science researchers and professionals in the field. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of experienced practitioners have shown a willingness to adopt science-based methods in…

What do we do with emotion in biographical research: is it an end in itself, a symptom to be explained, a thread to be pulled? This paper presents an experiment in methodology within a field of biographical methods that involved revisiting a single qualitative interview after the elapse of thirty years. The interview with 22 year old Stacey was…

Increasingly, the broader public, media and policymakers are looking to qualitative research to provide answers to our most pressing social questions. While an exciting and perhaps overdue moment for qualitative researchers, it is also a time when the method is coming under increasing scrutiny for a lack of reliability and transparency. The…

This paper analyzes the future of education, especially the future changes in education and the people that will occupy the field. What kind of people are we educating for the future? To answer this question, I will analyze the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of people-yet-to-come by taking into account the new perception and explanation of time and…

This paper responds to some recent discussions in the Journal about how interview data can be used. While recognising the value of detailed analysis of the discourse employed in interviews to identify its formal features, it is argued that such analysis is not essential for all the purposes for which interview data can be employed in social…