The interactional character of the social science interview

The basic text-metrical unit of the research interview is the question-answer sequence. The sequence begins with the interviewer’s topical question, usually read or paraphrased from a preconceived list of questions, followed by the interviewee’s comments and reflections. Frequently, the interviewer will follow up with requests to elaborate, paraphrased summaries to check for understanding, and probes for more detail. Though presumably neutral, the interviewers’ questions subtly communicate the researcher’s agenda, reflect selective uptake of prior responses, and imply a range of acceptable responses (Raymond Reference Raymond2003; Freed & Ehrlich Reference Freed and Ehrlich2010).

For their part, interviewees accommodate to the terms of engagement. Research shows that participants adjust to the interviewer’s social science agenda and craft their responses according to what they perceive the interviewer to need or want (Rapley & Antaki Reference Rapley and Antaki1998; De Fina Reference De Fina2009). But not always. Interviewees sometimes challenge the questions put to them, resist the interviewer’s assumptions, and even transform their agendas by strategically wording their stances and redirecting the topic (Stivers & Hayashi Reference Stivers and Hayashi2010). In short, interviewees’ responses are recipient-designed for this particular interviewer in this encounter. Interviewees are sensitive to what the interviewer’s purposes are, how the interviewer casts the identity of the interviewee, and where the talk seems to be going (Schegloff Reference Schegloff2007:89). Thus, the interviewer and interviewee co-produce a flow of talk—a denotational text—consisting of propositions, assertions, commentary, questions, and narratives. That flow of talk simultaneously functions as an interactional text through which both speakers orient to one another, pursue their agendas, and influence one another’s behavior (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003, Reference Silverstein2023; Agha Reference Agha2007; Wortham & Reyes Reference Wortham and Reyes2015).

Hence, from an interactional perspective, we ask: What are they doing to one another? Who are they to one another? Or, more precisely, who are they becoming to one another? On one level, answers to these questions are found in pre-interview processes of participant recruitment. Interviewers usually represent some institution (e.g. business, politics, education, public health) that grounds their entitlement to recruit and interview people. For their part, interviewees know that they have been invited to the interview as representatives and spokespersons for a certain social identity, institutional membership, professional standing, or life experience (Potter & Hepburn Reference Potter and Hepburn2005). Over the course of the interview, both interviewer and interviewee talk into being their social identities and social categories.

Asymmetric expectations

These conversational entitlements and obligations are not symmetrical, however. On the one hand, interviewees implicitly agree to be made accountable for their worlds and to engage in appropriate self-revelation, but they cannot expect the same from their interviewers. In fact, although interviewers are friendly, sympathetic, and curious, they learn to minimize self-revelation, unless it is strategically employed to encourage the trust and cooperation of the interviewee. Further, interviewers do not usually share their own opinions, make judgments, take sides, or criticize. Textbooks on interview methods in the social sciences often include the counsel: ‘Avoid evaluation of the interviewee’s contributions/keep it neutral’ (Mann Reference Mann2016:121).

In linguistic terms, trained interviewers prioritize alignment over affiliation (Stivers Reference Stivers2008). Signs of alignment (verbal and nonverbal) communicate acknowledgment, receipt, comprehension, and empathic understanding of what the interviewee says, and the strategic use of such signs is meant to keep the interviewee talking. By contrast, signals of affiliation or disaffiliation communicate actual agreement or disagreement, or endorsement or disapproval, of the interviewee’s opinions, assertions, or claims. Crucially, because these may be heard as judgments or evaluations of the interviewee, they risk closing off or subverting the interviewee’s authentic self-revelation. In short, signs of alignment may convey ‘I’m interested, please continue’, whereas signs of affiliation or disaffiliation may convey ‘I’m evaluating you’. Hence, the savvy interviewer maximizes the former and minimizes the latter.

Nevertheless, these genre constraints are not absolute, and both parties may trope the norms. Subtly, for instance, the interviewer’s acts of alignment may well be heard by the interviewee as endorsements. More overtly, interviewees sometimes directly query their interviewers about their opinions, positions, and life histories, and interviewers must make snap decisions about whether and how much to reveal. Alternately, interviewers sometimes boldly take sides and make explicit judgements precisely to provoke interviewees to elaborate.

Identity work

The research interview is an interaction ritual, and as Silverstein notes: ‘the creation, maintenance and transformation of identities is what interaction ritual, to resume Goffman’s term, is all about’ (2023:97). Over the course of an interview, interviewees build their moral identities and construct a world of other moral figures in their stories, anecdotes, and examples. They signal and construct their identities through behaviors, speech, and symbolic objects (e.g. clothing) that index social categories of personhood that are recognizable by others (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Sawyer1998, Reference Silverstein2006; Agha Reference Agha2007). Such identity formation is inherently reflexive, and speakers monitor and adjust their self-presentations (Goffman Reference Goffman1973) with an eye to how others see and hear them—that is, from a third-person perspective (De Fina & Georgakopoulou Reference De Fina and Georgakopoulou2012; Keane Reference Keane2016).

Identity work extends beyond such first-person claims, however. In their accounts and narratives, interviewees populate whole moral worlds by voicing and positioning other characterological figures (Goffman Reference Goffman1974; Bakhtin, Emerson, & Holquist Reference Bakhtin, Emerson and Holquist1981; Hill Reference Hill, Tedlock and Mannheim1995; Agha Reference Agha2007; Keane Reference Keane and Lambek2010; Wortham & Reyes Reference Wortham and Reyes2015). This process too is reflexive. As Ochs & Capps (Reference Ochs and Capps2001:284) note about storytelling: ‘Each telling positions not only protagonists but also tellers as more less moral persons… tellers strive to represent themselves as decent, ethical persons who pursue the moral high road in contrast to certain other protagonists in their narratives’.

Critically, these sociological types have specific ethical associations as well. For example, whereas ‘neighbor’ might denote ‘co-resident in a shared spatial surround’, the term also indexes moral expectation: neighbors should exercise a basic existential concern for co-residents (‘neighbors watch out for one another’). Similarly, ‘first responders’ refers to professional emergency personnel who manage immediate threats to survivors’ physical well-being and provide medical treatment to victims of accident, crime, or disaster, but the term also indexes first-responders’ selfless exposure to life-threatening dangers for the sake of victims. Neighbors and first responders are easily recognized as ethical agents or subjects. Correspondingly, however, there are also recognizable images of ‘ethical others’ (Faubion Reference Faubion2011) who are quintessential beneficiaries or ‘objects’ of ethical concern, as for example, children, the infirm, older adults, and victims of accidents or crime. These are categories of persons who are normatively deemed worthy of assistance, protection, or defense.

Moral accounting

As noted in the introduction, humans are forever evaluating themselves and others. This moral accounting involves orienting to right and wrong in one’s own and others’ behaviors, invoking and applying criteria, and allocating responsibility (Lambek Reference Lambek2010b; Laidlaw Reference Laidlaw2014; Keane Reference Keane2016). In a seminal article, Scott & Lyman (Reference Scott and Lyman1968:46) described accounts as a ‘linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to evaluative inquiry’. Two specific kinds of accounts are: excuses (denying full responsibility for a bad action) and justifications (accepting responsibility but denying the ‘badness’ of the action). In practice, moral accounting extends to any denotational-interactional framing of an event as moral by the interviewee (or interviewer, if that occurs). Thus, moral accounting is exercised in everyday acts of praise, blame, suspicion, accusation, excuse, forgiveness, and so on.

Although these acts may be accomplished semiotically through explicit performatives (j’accuse!), they are far more commonly mediated by indirection, implicit performatives, and context-dependent construals (Austin Reference Austin1962; Lempert Reference Lempert, Paulston, Kiesling and Elizabeth2012; Fleming & Lempert Reference Fleming, Lempert, Enfield, Kockelman and Sidnell2014). Consider, for example, the following exchange between two college roommates.

At an interactional level, A’s factual observation infers that someone has either moved or taken the money from his desk (he orients to right and wrong). Equally indirectly, B exonerates himself and raises suspicions about ‘the new guy from down the hall’ (he allocates responsibility). Note that this two-turn act of moral accounting involves no explicitly moral vocabulary and is based entirely on hearable implication and inference. Such indirection is at the heart of a great deal of moral accounting, even in the research interview.

Narratives therefore are a primary resource for interviewees to people a moral landscape and display and perform moral accounting. Nevertheless, in the research interview such moral storytelling can be heard as plainly informational. How might an interviewee invite an interviewer to actually engage in some way?

Recruitment to action

Recruitment to action refers to how we use language to get other people to do things in the constant, move-countermove (enchronic) social environment of human communication (Enfield & Sidnell Reference Enfield and Sidnell2017). In a research interview, for example, the interviewee might attempt to persuade the interviewer to approve, adopt, critique, or reject the interviewee’s moral beliefs and practices or even to join the exercise of moral accounting. Interviewees quite reasonably expect their interviewers to share the seemingly pan-human propensity to evaluate human behavior. In the terms that we have adopted in this article, the interviewee is faced with the task of moving the interviewer from conversational alignment to affiliation at points where the interviewee seeks actual approval or even shared commitment about moral positions and actions. Of course, the interviewee could just ask the interviewer to join him or her in moral evaluation, but this strategy directly challenges the role constraints of their relationship. Instead, interviewees opt for more indirect or covert means, and narratives provide a useful tool for doing this.

Reportive calibration

At a discursive level, Koven’s narrators used deictic transpositions in verb tenses and spatiotemporal adverbs to re-enact in the sociolinguistic interviews their past encounters with older relatives. Narrators used the historical present tense of verbs to transform past actions into present actions. They also used proximal adverbs (here, now) instead of distal adverbs (then, there) to relocate the action in the interview. These deictic shifts give a sense of vividness, create tension, and invite affective response, which function to draw hearers into the action (Perrino Reference Perrino2007). Of course, narrators also at times used the opposite strategy to keep past events tidily in the past by using past tense verbs and distal adverbs and demonstratives (then, there).

In the tradition of Bakhtin’s (Bakhtin et al. Reference Bakhtin, Emerson and Holquist1981) and Silverstein’s (Reference Silverstein2005) treatments of chronotopes—the time (chrono) and space (topos) envelopes of events—Perrino (Reference Perrino2007, Reference Perrino, Fina and Georgokapoulou2015) distinguishes these two types of narrative alignment as displaced chronotope alignment (past events narrated as past events in the interview) and coeval chronotope alignment (past events narrated as present events in the interview). As it turns out, it is the alternation of these strategies that enhances their differential effects on listeners.

Nomic calibration

Nomic calibration links timeless truths to the current event of speaking. Direct or indirect appeals to ‘the way the world is’ or ‘how things should be’ are nomic because they index abstract realms of truth or normativity (Agha Reference Agha2007:44). Moral commentary and idealized moral characters are also nomic in this way.

A crucial contribution of Koven’s (Reference Koven2016) work on calibration is tracing how the shift from reportive to nomic calibration (from the specific to the generic) imparts compelling force to the nomic in the narrating event. She explores three narrative practices in this regard. First, as in reportive calibration, the use of present tense verbs to relate past events effectively stages the event in the timeless present.

Second, first-person plural pronouns (we), impersonal second person (you), or third person (one, it) work to invoke overarching social or cultural norms. Thus, ‘We don’t use Professor or Doctor here to address faculty, we use Mr. and Ms.’; ‘You don’t do that here’; ‘It’s not the done thing’: all work to announce social norms.

Finally, a narrator might use a specific-to-generic voicing strategy to blur and fuse distinctions in their use of first-person pronouns. Koven (Reference Koven2016:23) notes three such usages of the narrator’s ‘I’: (i) a here-and-now ‘I’ narrating a there-and-then event to her audience, (ii) a here-and-now ‘I’ addressing her audience about some point in the narrative (possibly from within the narrative), and (iii) the ‘I’ of the narrator’s character in the story itself. As a result of this deictic prodigality, ‘the distance between narrating and narrated events appears to collapse, creating an iconic parallelism between them (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Lucy1993; Wortham Reference Wortham2001)’, as a result of which the narrative audience may feel a powerful appeal to react, respond, or at least endorse the moral claim or course of action. This is precisely what happened in Koven’s sociolinguistic interviews: interviewees successfully recruited interviewers to affiliate with their stances.

In sum, in both Koven’s and Perrino’s work we see that interviewee-narrators strategically shift deictic forms to alternate between holding narrated moments in the past versus projecting the action into the here-and-now of interview time. From these re-projected events, interviewees draw out timeless social types and moral truths. Finally, especially in cases in which interviewer and interviewee share moral worldviews, the interviewee can appeal to the interviewer to engage in the project of moral accounting; that is, to move from alignment to affiliation in the research interview.

In sum, we have described three core moral actions that interviewees ‘do’ during research interviews: identity work, moral accounting, and recruitment to action, and we have reviewed the semiotic-discursive practices through which they accomplish these actions. We have paid particular attention to how an interviewee might move beyond producing reports of his or her ethical life and attempt to conscript or co-opt the interviewer into the moral accounting. To explore these dynamics, we present a single narrative, from a study of post-disaster recovery in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 (López de Victoria Rodríguez, González Márquez, & Colón Rivera Reference de Victoria Rodríguez, Patria, González Márquez, Colón Rivera, Brett and Robert2022; Schrauf & López de Victoria Rodríguez Reference Schrauf and López de Victoria Rodríguez2024) for the purpose of exploring how one narrator accomplishes the various moral tasks outlined above. Our analysis treats one question-answer sequence from an interview with a paramedic, a sequence which demonstrates all three interactional effects adduced above as ‘doing being moral’ in a research interview.

Data collection: Ethnography and semi-structured interviews

Data for this article derive from a project that addressed medical help seeking among survivors of the hurricane living in the municipality of San Isidro Labrador (pseudonym), with a population of 48,000, located in the central mountain range. We conducted over 100 interviews at one- and two-year intervals after the event (see López de Victoria Rodríguez et al. Reference de Victoria Rodríguez, Patria, González Márquez, Colón Rivera, Brett and Robert2022), and for this article we consulted interviews with recovery personnel (twenty-four interviews in the first year; sixteen in the second). The ninety-minute interviews focused primarily on participants’ job responsibilities; sources of advice and equipment; other organizations in their professional networks; places where patients or clients might be referred; accounts of difficult or tense days; and estimations of when ‘things seemed to be returning to normal’. None of our questions specifically addressed moral issues or challenges, but interviewers did ask participants about tense days or severe cases. It is these latter moments that are of interest in this article.

Identity work

In response to the interviewer asking for an anecdote (excerpt (1), lines 3–5) from three to four months after the hurricane, the paramedic invokes a distressing picture of older adults, living alone, abandoned by their families (lines 6–8), a situation that violates the core cultural value of a family’s responsibility for its older generation. In talking about the kind of help that “we want” for these persons (line 9), he abruptly cuts himself off and substitutes the first-person “I specifically I” (want them to have this help). He expands on this theme in line 11, “with old people and with children I’m something else” and in lines 13–14 “I can’t bear to see an old (person)… who doesn’t have that help”. In the coda to the narrative (not shown) he returns to this opening claim by repeating his special concern for old people and children. These two concerns become emblematic (Agha Reference Agha2007:235–36) of his moral identity.

His identity work includes three key social personae at the center of his story: the old woman, the neighbors, and the paramedics. Each of these is associated with certain cultural models that specify aspects of their social identities. Across all three iterations, the paramedic-narrator employs social indexicals that cumulatively configure each of these figures (Wortham & Reyes Reference Wortham and Reyes2015). These social types, cultural models, and their constitutive indexicals are shown in Table 1.

Table 1.

Social indexicals configuring three sociological types across three repeated iterations of narrative details.

Moral accounting

In the first two iterations of the narrative, the paramedic dramatically performs in reported thought and reported speech his dawning realization that the neighbors are at fault. In line 66, he says, “that was the moment that really struck me”, but he doesn’t say what struck him—though it seems that the arrival of the neighbors was the trigger (lines 67–69). Ten lines later (line 76) he says, “[Let’s] get out because I’m not [staying here] one minute more”, but again he doesn’t say why he wants to escape—though he follows up by commenting on the deteriorating interior of the house (lines 77–78). The story finally comes together in (lines 82–89) when he explicitly lays out the case: the neighbors come in every day; they know a hurricane is coming; they do not give a warning; the old woman falls and lays on the floor for two days. This time he puts reported speech in the mouth of the neighbors whom he voices ingenuously: “Ah the lady fell” (line 87). In sum, through the slow disclosure of the details (Ochs & Capps Reference Ochs and Capps2001:135–41), he sets up a dramatic presentation of his case in the third iteration of the story.

A key feature of this narrative performance is a shift in reportive calibration. Iteration 1 tells the story as a completed event. Iterations 2 and 3 project critical past moments into the present tense of the interview. More specifically, in the first iteration (lines 63–72), the paramedics’ finding the woman on the floor is wholly displaced from the narrating event (the interview) into the there-and-then of September 2017. All verbs are in past tense (lines 63–68, 72), and the narrator uses two distal demonstratives to qualify the events (line 67: en ese momento ‘at that moment’; line 72: ese día ‘on that day’)

Throughout the rest of the narrative, the narrator shifts from past to non-past tenses and back again. In Iteration 2, line 75 suggests that he will preserve the past tense telling: “when we got there it was…”, but he abruptly shifts his narration to the here-and-now. His “let’s go”, or perhaps “let’s’ get out” (vámanos, line 75) is in present tense and leads into a direct reported thought in line 76, also in present tense: “I’m not thinking uh of being one minute more here”. This latter includes the proximal deictics (one minute more here). This coeval realignment has several possible effects: it expresses the emotional intensity of his psychological reaction (Perrino Reference Perrino2011:96), his remembered consciousness of the experience (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2023:39), and it allows him to demonstrate (Clark & Gerrig Reference Clark and Gerrig1990) for a second time the sudden insight that he reported earlier in line 66 (i.e. this event never had to happen). In lines 77–78, he describes the interior of the house, but as he goes on to frame the woman’s situation as worthy of municipal attention, he shifts back into present tenses (lines 78–79).

In Iteration 3, he lays out his moral argument in three conditional if-then formulae in two separate verses in present tense (lines 82–85, 88). Then, in two interspersed verses, he describes the fate of the woman in past tense (lines 86–87), but he shifts again to present tense in expressing a third conditional (line 88).

Recruitment to action

Iterations 2 and 3 bring the case out of the past into the moment of the interview (reportive calibration) and in Iteration 3 the paramedic appeals to a realm of timeless moral principle and formal logic to prosecute the case and render its import (nomic calibration). This shift in calibration gives the case its moral heft in two ways.

First, the paramedic’s narrative laminates three versions of his first-person role in reported thought and speech (Koven Reference Koven2016). In Iteration 1, line 66, upon finding the woman on the floor, he says, “That was the moment that really struck me”. His here-and-now, paramedic interviewee ‘I’ picks out a past self (“me”) in a past moment (“that moment”) in a there-and-then, completed event. Similarly, he begins Iteration 2 in first-person plural: “When we got there” (line 75), and again his narrating, paramedic-interviewee ‘I’ picks out a past self (“we”) in a completed story. By contrast, in the next line (line 76), he voices his reported thought from within the narrative—“I’m not thinking uh of being one minute more here”. This ‘I’ is the paramedic-in-the-narrative and offering his inner speech in the present tense of the interview.

Finally, in Iteration 3, he transposes his paramedic-interviewee ‘I’ to a hypothetical “if… I as the neighbor” (line 82), which he then repeatedly occupies through a series of if-then statements “[if] I know there’s a a weather event coming” (line 83), then “I give a warning” (line 84), then “I have to wait till she falls” (line 85). In each of these instances, the ‘I’ seems deictically non-selective. It does not pick out an empirically real and situationally locatable ‘I’ but rather represents a sociological type (the neighbor). This hypothesized ‘I’ is arguably now a generic, impersonal nomic ‘I’. This interpretation is confirmed by the paramedic’s shift to the more common, generic, nomic ‘you’ in the conditional in line 88: “if you know”.

Through this complex layering of the narrating ‘I’, the neighbors’ act of negligence (a specific event) morphs into a timeless lesson in the interview (generic moral case). Importantly, the effect of the moral pronouncement derives from the performance of the moral anecdote, and the shift compellingly brings the case, victim and villain, into the interview frame itself. The paramedic-interviewee positions the interviewer as witness and attempts to win her judgment. This latter is the recruitment to action.

Iteration 3 lays out the moral case, and as noted above, this is the act of accounting. The case takes the form of a moral syllogism: If you know X, then you are morally responsible for doing Y. He instantiates this formula in three conditionals (Table 2).

In the first two if-statements (antecedents), he takes on the identity and moral responsibilities of the neighbor via a pronominal deictic transposition: “if I as the neighbor”. Note that the plural ‘neighbors’ of the first two iterations (lines 68, 72, 79) becomes singular, deictically non-selective, and stereotypical in line 82: the neighbor.

Table 2.

If-then conditionals (antecedents, consequents, and retorts) in Iteration 3.

Correspondingly, the first two then-statements (consequents) are cast as rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions, of course, grammatically prefer informational answers, but their illocutionary function is to make ‘some kind of claim, or assertion, an assertion of the opposite polarity to that of the question’ (Koshik Reference Koshik2005:2). Thus, the paramedic-narrator’s rhetorical question in lines 84 and 85 invite the unspoken retorts of the opposite polarity: “(but I) can give a warning”, and “(but I) don’t have to wait” (third column of Table 2). The third conditional obeys the exact same dynamic, except that the paramedic shifts from the deictic ‘I as neighbor’ to voice a generic you: “if you know the conditions that lady lives in” (line 88). He leaves unspoken the then-statement at opposite polarity, but the generic ‘you’ extends responsibility for the woman to anyone who knows the conditions in which she lives.

However, in the final lines (90–96), the paramedic issues a direct nomic injunction in which the subject terms (who is responsible?) dissolve into universal obligation while the object terms (for whom are subjects responsible?) come to encompass all older people. First, in terms of who is responsible, he shifts from the pronominal generic you in line 88 to a desubjectified periphrastic deontic modal in lines 90 and 94. This is the hay que + infinitive form which is conjugated exclusively in the third person and communicates instruction, advice, or recommendation (Serrano Reference Serrano2021). Idiomatically, the closest English equivalent is the generic ‘you’ or perhaps ‘one’, but taken literally these utterances express pure obligation: “[there is the obligation] to give it that emphasis that these older persons need” (line 90) and “[there is the obligation] to be hand in hand with these people” (line 94). These impersonal moral modals bind not only the interviewers and reflexively himself but, more broadly, everyone.

Thus, the overall trajectory of the paramedic’s response to the interviewer’s request for ‘a particular case’ has gone from a story about an EMS run just after the hurricane to a nomic moral injunction about proper attention to the elderly before, during, and after a hurricane. Further, he has transformed a past event into a dramatized (litigated?) moral case, and he challenges the interviewer to endorse his judgment.

As a final point, we might ask whether and how the interviewers took up that moral challenge. Oddly and circumstantially, their talk was diverted almost immediately by a phone call, taken by the second paramedic in the room. This person took the first paramedic aside to deal with that call, and when the first paramedic returned, he wrapped up his story by confirming his claim that “with old people and children, I’m something else”. The drama having drained away, the interviewer went on to her next scheduled question. In one sense, then, this recruitment to moral action does not seem to have met with success. In another sense, however, this narrative is but one moment in a ninety-minute interview in which the paramedic-narrator steadily performs his moral identity and issues other ‘recruitments to action’. And, in the end, he is ‘preaching to the choir’ in that the interviewer already shares his moral commitments and concerns.