Abstract
When I agreed to review this book, I thought I would learn about a new form of interviewing. Since I had been deconstructing the interview for years, I figured there would be additional territory to examine epistemological bearings – more grist for exploring the question of what undergirds the logic of interviewing. The origin of problem-centred interviewing (PCI), which the authors describe as stemming from research conducted in the 1970s at the University of Bremen, suggested that I had missed something important in addressing this question. Perhaps I missed it because PCI’s literature was not available in English, which sadly is par for the course for Americans like me who practise the trade in one language. So I was eager to read about what I should have known years ago.
Having finished the book, I will describe what I learned. First, the title and contents suggest that the authors and their colleagues were, from the start, on to a type of interviewing the aim of which was to explore problems as opposed to something else. But it wasn’t clear to me as I read the book what that something else was. I kept asking myself, are there forms of interviewing that are not about problems? Social problems? Personal problems? Conceptual problems? Procedural problems? Informational problems? Therapeutic problems? Ethical problems? The list is endless. Why would one conduct interviews if there weren’t a problem leading the way? So, on this count, I learned that there was little if anything distinctive about PCI. This is a significant shortcoming, as the point of a new form of interviewing would be its distinctiveness.
Second, as I read the how-to chapters, I learned specific things about the interview process that were familiar. For example, Chapter 3, ‘Preparing PCIs’, repeated a good deal of what is known about question design, forms of prior knowledge, the use of a sensitizing framework, interview guides, interviewer training, sampling and access. Chapter 4, ‘Doing PCIs’, discussed interview procedure, including establishing rapport, opening questions, follow-ups, the relation to short questionnaires, exiting and debriefing. Not much new there, and certainly nothing exclusive to PCIs. Chapter 5, ‘Processing PCIs’, was about transcription, analysis and interpretation. The usual bromides were present, with little concern for whether anything was specific to PCIs. The last three chapters of the book described at length three studies that used PCIs, which, frustratingly for me, had been only cursorily mentioned at the start of the book, repeatedly referenced in succeeding chapters as Studies A, B and C, but not explicated until much later. Did the authors assume that the reader had foresight antennas that would kick in before the studies were adequately described? Here, again, other than Studies A, B and C, there didn’t seem to be anything distinctive about PCI.
Third, I did learn baseless things about the authors’ claims and wondered about their skill as textbook writers. I learned: (a) that PCI is mistakenly said to be informed by ethnomethodology and the documentary method, even while the latter is drawn from an entirely different vision of reality, how it works, and the way to know it, which does not include interviewing; (b) that PCI is claimed to be a ‘discursive-dialogic method of reconstructing knowledge about relevant problems’, even while neither the discursive and dialogic facets of knowledge production and analysis nor the reconstruction of knowledge is hardly there in the enterprise as described; (c) that clear and straightforward English prose in an English language text is not the authors’ forte, nor evidently was it the copyeditor’s or the publisher’s goal; (d) that illustrative ‘boxes’ obfuscated more than they illuminated their subject matter; and (e) that, while it is claimed that PCI epistemologically challenges us, it is evident, if this book is any indication, that PCI is epistemologically challenged.
I can’t know what the authors had in mind when they coined the term PCI decades ago. From the tone of the presentation, there seemed to have been a sense of having stumbled across something new. There also appears to have been a feeling of having been put upon methodologically at the time by bigger and competing methodological brothers. There was an anxious desire, it seems, to let empirical discovery rather than grand theory, formal theorizing and hypothesis testing lead the way. Many of us experienced this decades ago and it still resonates in various quarters. That has never been exclusive to an enterprise called PCI, nor to the experience of its adherents.
Should a book about problem-centred interviewing have been published? That would have depended on the goal. The back of the book suggests one answer. According to the three endorsements and, beneath that, the publisher’s paragraph description, which was likely approved by the authors, this is a methodology book that approaches interviewing like a ‘well-informed traveler’, organizing questions and responses ‘depending on the people encountered along the road’. This has been a commitment and feature of participatory forms of interviewing for years and certainly has been part-and-parcel of the ethnographic interview from the start, which is long-standing. The irony is that if PCI is one of a breed of interviewing of this kind, why present it so positivistically, as if the well-informed traveller forgets PCI’s reflexive mission and repeatedly takes on the role of the contrasting ‘miner-interviewer’? So, if the goal was to ‘collect knowledge by means of involving people actively in the research process’, there is not much new on this front and several things that are wrong or oddly out of place. The answer here is that it does not work as a methods book and should not have been published.
The other answer would have depended on the goal being a retrospective account of the historical context and subsequent development of an approach to interviewing once viewed as subjective, anecdotal and unscientific. Well-written, such a book could have been a marvellous account of methodological innovation in a time of procedural orthodoxy. It could have begun with Studies A, B and C and described the theoretical and procedural environment in which they were completed. How, analytically and technically, did highly irregular roles for interview participants and an ‘unscientific’ sense of the rules of interviewing get accepted? What made it possible for that to happen at Bremen and in Germany? How did this relate to parallel developments in other countries? The authors then would have come into view biographically as living epistemological participants of a new way of knowing. A participatory methodological history would have unfolded. This well-informed traveller would have welcomed the publication of that kind of book.