Both interviewees and interviewers do tend to build narratives into their questions and answers for a variety of reasons (see Clayman & Heritage 2002 "The News Interview"), dependent on the type of interviews as well. While removing the narrative part from the sequential analysis of the interview will deprive you from getting a total picture of what the narration is doing, I don't see a problem with non-conversation-analysts simply using the narratives in interviews as data for other purposes.

Thank you, Ni-Eng Lim, for your answer and reading suggestion.

I read one chapter a couple of days ago - "Narrative practive and the transformation of interview subjectivity (Gubrium e Holstein, 2012) - and they say what follows: "Interviews result in locally pertinent narratives— some longer than others— that represent versions of opinion, persons, events, and the world at large. The circumstances of narrative production are deeply and unavoidably implicated in creating the meanings that ostensibly reside within individual experience. Meaning is not merely directly elicited by skillful questioning, nor is it simply transported through truthful replies; it is strategically assembled in the interview process (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995). (...) This view reconceptualizes interviews in terms of narrative practice" (Gubrium e Holstein, 2012, p. 32). So, in this sense, they redefine the interview activity into narrative practice. And this theoretical position is different from that in which interviews promote narrative activities and then we need to locate narrative excerpts inside the interview. This approach may look like Conversation Analysis.

But this last approach is not exaclty what I´m trying to do. I´m trying to study a new way to understand interview reserach, i.e., to understand the whole interview as a narrative practice. Does anyone know people (besides Gumbrium and Holstein) who discuss interview as narrative practice?

I certainly think you can use the insight that interviews are active constructions without using Conversation Analysis. You might find an article I did a few years that is available at http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/244/539

(O'Rourke, Brendan K. & Pitt, Martyn (2007). Using the Technology of the Confessional as an Analytical Resource: Four Analytical Stances Towards Research Interviews in Discourse Analysis [58 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 8(2), Art. 3, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs070238*.

Many thanks for your suggestions and reply, Brendan!

I´ll take a look at the suggestions!

And you can apply text analysis principles developed for narratives to see if the participants are structuring some or all of the interviews as narratives.

Thank you, Tina, for your reply. But can you suggest me an example of the text analysis principles you cited?

Let me explain: since I was planning to analyze interview as narrative, but focusing on the interacion movement/processes, I was wondering about using some sociologuistic and sociological concepts, such as footing and frame (Goffman, 1979) and orders of indexicality (Blommaert, 2010), cues of contextualization (Gumperz, 1982), besides deitics and predication (Wortham, 2001). But if you have other suggetions I´ll be glad to know.

Hi Maria,

I as I understand you, your goal is to look at interviews as performative events--instead of looking for narrative segments the interviewer has brought out, the interview as a whole can be understood as an interactive performance between the interviewer and respondent. I think you might find Bamberg's adaption of the Labov & Waletzky narrative model useful:

Bamberg, Michael GW. "Positioning between structure and performance." Journal of narrative and life history 7, no. 1-4 (1997): 335-342.

Bamberg presents an example of how to use functional aspects of narrative in interviews (e.g. temporality, evaluation, narrative positioning) to achieve pragmatic ends in interviews.

BTW, if you haven't read Labov & Waleztsky's original piece on narrative structures in personal experience, I highly recommend it--it's the foundational work for narrative analysis methods:

Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience." (1997).

Dear William, many thanks four your suggestion. I´ve read a little bit about Labov and his followers. The point, as I could understand, is that Labov was more interested in the internal structure of the narrative. He has even proposed the prototipical narrative.

You were very precise when you said I´m interested in analyzing interviews as performative events.

I´m working with Austin (1962), Derrida (1972), Bulter (1990; 1993) and Pennycook (2010) to argue that language is action and performative and that even in the apparent repetition of texts and performances there is difference, because no context is repeatable or the same, nor are the involved people, the time-space circunstances, the power relationships, the histories and so on.

Then, my focus is not on the internal structure of narrative, but on its social-discursive-effects. In my text, I cite Labov because he was the precursor of narrative studies, but I´m really interested in the article you suggested about positioning (Bamberg).

I guess positioning dialogues very well with my argument of performances as contingent and provisory enactments or footings (Goffman, 1979).

I´ve already found it at the web, downloaded it and I´ll read in the folowing days.

Thanks a lot and best wishes.

If you are interested, I worked a lot on the pragmatics of examination and cross-examination in the hearing room,. especially with victims and perpetrators of war crimes. Contact me at [email protected]

Dear Katherine Bischoping, many thanks for your precious contribution and comments.

I may say they will be really helpful.

I totally agree with you concerning the point that I may undergo a narrative-interview analysis with no need of mentioning CA. My worries concerned the fact that I use the TimeSpace scale concept (Wallerstein, 1998; Blommaert, 2010; Collins and Slembrouk, 2007) and I try to conciliate macro and micro elements in my analysis. In doing so, I also make references to contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1986) that may index micro and macro scales. But since I intend "to look carefully" to what happens in the narrative-interview interaction I was afraid that people "could think" I was doing CA, although I knew I wasn´t. Then, I was looking for more theoretical support to help me in this argumentation, since it would help to make stronger my point. 

So, I´m looking forward to read the suggestions you made me. Thanks a lot! :)

Maria,

I think you could, by using the stance theory, as a discourse pragmatic tool. A recent conceptualisation which offers a snippet of the different approaches to stance taking can be found in Schneider and Barron (eds.) (2014), Pragmatics of Discourse. I feel you could start from there. I hope you succeed and I hope you could send me a copy of your research once published.

Best wishes.