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The feedback interview has proven to be an evolving research technique. A rich array of data has emerged in a variety of settings, interpreted by scholars from a range of disciplines. The present authors explore the multidisciplinary capacity of this technique, focusing on their own work employing video recording in East Africa, where Angela Stone-MacDonald works in special education in Tanzania, and West Africa, where Ruth Stone conducts research in ethnomusicology in Liberia. The authors describe some of the changes in using video and technology in ethnographic research to elicit rich, multivocal responses from participants that have occurred over the past thirty years.
The feedback interview, defined more than thirty years ago as "the playback and recall of a completed event in which the researcher and participant attempt to reconstruct meaning" (Stone and Stone 1981), has proven to be an evolving research technique through the intervening period. A rich array of data has emerged in a variety of settings, interpreted by scholars in a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The present authors explore the multidisciplinary capacities of this technique, focusing on their own work in East Africa and West Africa: Angela Stone-MacDonald works in Tanzania, East Africa, in special education (Stone-MacDonald 2010, 2012), and Ruth M. Stone conducts research in Liberia, West Africa, in ethnomusicology (Stone 1982, 1988, 2005). The authors draw on related work from education and ethnomusicology, where feedback interviews have yielded rich and nuanced ideas in ethnographic research. Finally, to give other researchers ideas on how they can use the techniques in their own research and disciplines, the authors summarize the ways to use video and feedback interviews in qualitative research and some of the contrasting ways they use the techniques.
The Feedback Interview as a Technique
In ethnographic research situations, playback or feedback might be as basic as pointing to an object in the presence of someone in an attempt to get him or her to comment on it (Harris and Voegelin 1953). The object is a medium for information, and it may elicit a verbal response. Researchers show photographs, present musical instruments or other objects, and play audiotapes or video recordings with the intention of eliciting feedback (Pauwels 2010; Stone and Stone 1981). All these...