This article concentrates on how interviewees experience the context of semi-structured or open interviews as a “test,” both in terms of being an interviewee and in terms of the roles presupposed in what the interview is about. It invites a reflexive discourse-analytical turn in which we concentrate on the interactional negotiation of various aspects of the interview situation and the interview as an interactional accomplishment. The focus is on the implications for the status of the data that was subsequently obtained, with an eye to locating “the social forces that impress on the ethnographic locale” (Burawoy 1998:15). Insights obtained in this way are argued to bear directly on our understanding of the central research topic under investigation. The data used here have been drawn from a research project on social class and coding orientations in experiential accounts of child protection in Belgium/Flanders. The data base consists of interviews with parent clients. (Data histories, narrative, interview as test, social class, child protection, ethnographic reflexivity)

This article examines narratives of professional experience in a corpus of forty interviews in which English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers reflect on their professional life histories as well as their current teaching. The notion of “stance” emerged as a major theme: the teachers positioned themselves in relation to the policy environment, to learners, teaching and learning, and their sense of control in their working lives. Narrative was an important discursive resource for doing so and a range of narrative types (personal, generic/iterative, hypothetical, exemplum, and ‘negated’) are identified, each demonstrating performance features. Using Dubois's (2007) definition of stance, I examine the dynamic relationship between stance taking and discursive positioning, discussing the role of performance in these processes. Shifts into performance are shown to depend on participant roles and alignments in the interviews rather than on particular narrative types. Thus, the data contradicts some of Wolfson's (1976) observations on narratives in the research interview. The analysis contributes to our understanding of the research interview as a dynamically co-constructed speech genre rather than as a neutral locus for gathering data. (Professional narrative, performance, stance, alignment, positioning)

In this article I challenge the notion that interviews are artificial speech events, by comparing how one participant told stories in a sociolinguistic interview and again in a subsequent spontaneous conversation. As shown by qualitative and quantitative comparison of speaker-role inhabitance (Koven 2002, 2007), I show that the interview stories are no less involved (Tannen 1989), and are actually more interlocutory than the conversational stories. With these comparative materials, I demonstrate how interviews may be contexts in which people (re)tell experiences that they may also tell in “naturally occurring” contexts. (Narrative, interviews, footing, retellings)

Narratives in interviews involve the alignment of two chronotopes (Bakhtin's term, literally ‘time-space’) or what has traditionally been termed the narrated and narrating events. While narrators are expected to separate the there-and-then narrated-event chronotope from the here-and-now narrating-event chronotope, tropic forms of coeval alignment exist that erase or blur the line between the two events, as if they were occurring in the same time and place. In this article I argue for the need to map these shifting alignments in interviews. This article begins with, but then moves beyond, the familiar case of the “historical present,” where narrators shift into using nonpast temporal deixis for past events. Drawing first on an oral narrative from Italy, I show how resources besides the historical present can produce similar alignment effects. In order to demonstrate more extreme forms of coeval alignment, I then compare these data with those from a Senegalese narrator in Dakar who transposes participants “into” his stories. Through this comparison I illustrate how cross-chronotope alignment reveals the way narrators manage the relationship between story and event in interviews. Mapping these shifting alignments can help illuminate the emergent relations between interviewer and interviewee and hence show how stories reflect and shape the interview context in which they occur. (Narrative, interview, chronotope, historical present, Italian, Senegal)*