In this paper, I look at the interview as a tool for eliciting information across communicative contexts and professions, an interactional format with an identifiable structure that can be learned, a cultural form that encodes meaning, and an opportunity for exploring and unpacking a genre form that is commonplace in Western society – with a comparative focus on its role in journalism and academia.
To this end, I point to Charles Briggs' slim 1986 volume – Learning How to Ask – which for more than 30 years has characterized the pitfalls of misunderstanding the social science interview as both a social and structural entity, and has encouraged generations of scholars to rethink their assumptions about interactions in field interviews and the role they play as interviewers. Alongside Briggs, Schiffrin's (1984) paper on voice and alignment in sociolinguistic interviews, highlighting the coordinated role of the interviewer and interview, Cotter's (2010, 2015) work on media genre and interview practice, and Haapanen's (2017) and Merminod's (2020) research on quotation and its refraction, demonstrate how the 'writing down' of interview content can be analyzed in terms of practices and norms and what that can reveal across contexts.
I look at interview data from three vantage points: theoretically, metacommunicatively (cf. Briggs) and interactionally (cf. Schiffrin). While the fieldsite and newsroom domains are different in terms of what each profession expects, the participation, interaction, mediation, stance, and collective memory that accrue in both cases are shared elements. I use examples collected from my own and others' sociolinguistic and ethnographic interviews (showing the 'learning how to ask' metacommunitive awareness that students and practitioners acquire through reflective practice) and journalism classes (in which issues of face and role identity are learned alongside the rhetorical and interactional values of reporting).
I argue that the interview as a 'known' structure and with an identifiable function creates 'interpretive stability' (Cotter 2010) and becomes embedded and ritualized (Goffman 1981) in a range of professional and interactional contexts – until it doesn't any longer, as other papers in this symposium demonstrate.
Briggs, Charles. 1986. Learning How to Ask : A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Science Research. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Cotter, Colleen. 2010. News Talk : Investigating the Language of Journalism. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, Ervin. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press.
Haapanen, Lauri. 2017. Monologisation as a quoting practice. Obscuring the journalist's
involvement in written journalism. Journalism Practice 11:7, 820−839.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2016.1208057
Merminod, Gilles. 2020. Narrative analysis applied to text production. Investigating the
processes of quoting in the making of a broadcast news story. AILA Review 33, 103−118.
https://benjamins.com/catalog/aila.00032.mer
Schiffrin, Deborah (1984). "Speaking for another" in sociolinguistic interviews: Alignments, identities, and frames. In Tannen, Deborah (ed.), Framing in discourse, 231–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
