Reading focus
Syllabus: How Can We Study Experience and Meaning?
Compare the interview representations and the authors’ reasons for preserving interactional detail.
Why you’re reading it. Evaluate how material is produced before treating it as evidence of a private experience or everyday practice.
A question to consider. An interviewer asks, “Why did you fail to fit in?” Rewrite the question and explain how both versions might shape the account and its interpretation.
Why this reading
An interview is an interaction as well as a source of accounts. Potter and Hepburn show how questions, responses and transcription choices affect what an analyst can reasonably infer.
Before you read
Discursive psychology examines what talk does in context. Footing concerns the position from which someone speaks, such as witness, expert or group member. A transcript selects features of speech rather than reproducing everything about an encounter.
Read for
- Compare the versions of the interview extract: what disappears when the interviewer and conversational detail are removed?
- Distinguish reporting problems from features the authors regard as unavoidable in interviews.
Consider afterwards
- How could you investigate an everyday practice using both interviews and records of the practice itself? What would each contribute?
Editorial context
This is an argument from a discursive perspective, illustrated with interview material. It is not a systematic estimate of how often the problems occur. Its preference for naturalistic records remains a choice to justify; those records also involve access, consent and interpretive decisions.