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Qual Sociol (2014) 37:153171
DOI 10.1007/s11133-014-9274-z
Michle Lamont & Ann Swidler
Published online: 8 April 2014# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques.
Keywords Interviewing . Ethnography. Methodology. Cultural sociology. Methodological pluralism . Theory
Between 1984 and 2010, the number of undergraduate students who received a degree in sociology rose from 12,000 to 29,000 in the United States.1 This period of relative prosperity occurred at the same time as our discipline dug itself out of the sectarian methodological fights that had plagued the sixties and seventies, particularly those opposing micro and qualitative to macro and quantitative (Mullins 1973; Turner and Turner 1990). We moved toward a period of pluralistic coexistence, with an acknowledgement of the benefits of living together under a big tent, one that made room for the simultaneous flourishing of various types of excellence (see
1This rate is comparable to the growth rate of the social sciences. The rates were 48.1 for sociology and 50.5 for the social sciences for the period 19842010 https://webcaspar.nsf.gov/OlapBuilder
Web End =https://webcaspar.nsf.gov/OlapBuilder )
M. Lamont
Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail: [email protected]
A. Swidler (*)
University of California, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-1980, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing
154 Qual Sociol (2014) 37:153171
Lamont...