Brigitte Jordan

Interactional Troubles in Face-to-Face Survey Interviews

For statistically based social science, survey research is the principal means of obtaining data about the social world. The interview from this point of view is a standardized data-collection procedure that uses a questionnaire as its instrument of measurement; however, the interview is an essentially interactional event as well. From the moment that the interviewer sits down across from the respondent and begins to talk, the survey interview assumes and relies on a wealth of conventions and resources from ordinary conversation. At the same time, the concern with standardized procedures and the statistical notion of error that standardization is intended to address impose constraints on the survey interview that make it significantly different from ordinary conversation. Those constraints have consequences for both the way the interview proceeds and the data that it produces. In this article we look at the survey interview as a standardized procedure that relies on, but also suppresses, crucial elements of ordinary conversation. Our analysis is based on videotapes of five special interviews, three using the General Social Survey (GSS) and two using the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). The videotapes were made for research purposes in conjunction with the Seminar on Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology sponsored by the Committee on National Statistics of the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council. [For a report on that seminar see Jabine, Straf, Tanur, and Tourangeau (1984).] They show interviews with volunteer respondents. Trained U.S. Census Bureau interviewers were hired by the committee to administer the NHIS questionnaire as they would for the survey; similarly, trained interviewers administered the GSS questionnaires. These particular interviews, however, were not part of the respective surveys. Our analysis of the videotapes was carried out during the summer of 1986, funded by the Committee on Cognition and Survey Research of the Social Science Research Council and by Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. We take the

Co-Constructing Non-Mutual Realities: Delay-Generated Trouble in Distributed Interaction

The use of remote communication technologies to carry out dailywork is becoming increasingly common, and their use in certainsettings is already commonplace. Yet, in spite of the fact thatsignificant sums are being spent on the acquisition oftechnologies to support distributed work, we are only beginningto understand the intricacies of these interactions. This paperidentifies and analyzes one particular limitation of video-basedteleconferencing, the impact of an audio and video delay ondistributed communication. It offers a detailed microanalysis ofone distributed teams use of videoconferencing to support remoteteamwork. We explore through this analysis the impact whichtechnology-generated delays may have on shared meaning-makingbetween remote participants. We draw conclusions about thesignificance of our findings for understanding talk, interactionand collaboration across remote links, and conclude withrecommendations for designers, users and implementers.

Capturing complex, distributed activities: video-based interaction analysis as a component of workplace ethnography

Organizations increasingly carry out their work by relying on complex, distributed activities supported by a wide range of technologies for synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration. How do we capture complex, distributed activities? What tools do we use in settings where even a team of trained ethnographers could not comprehend, much less record, all the interplays between team members, the subtleties of a look or tone, the shifts in orientation to people or objects in the workspace? In this paper, we explore the use of video-based Interaction Analysis to extend the ability of traditional ethnographic methods for data collection and analysis. We draw on a study of a distributed organization’s use of remote meeting technologies to illustrate how this approach contributes to the depth of insights to be garnered from workplace ethnography.

Persuasive Encounters: Ethnography in the Corporation

In corporate settings, ethnographic methods are challenged routinely by managers who confront ethnographers with a set of typical objections that question the validity and effectiveness of ethnographic methods, findings, and recommendations. This article offers a series of steps toward overcoming this impasse by laying out a set of arguments for legitimizing ethnographic work. We discuss ways of responding to a variety of problematic encounters, involving some relatively quick answers to challenges of that sort but also acknowledging that the different worldviews of managers and ethnographers can be reconciled only in a long-term educational effort. In the last analysis, embedding ethnography in corporations is an exercise in culture change that almost always relies on rephrasing questions and reformulating metaphors to resituate our practice.

Chapter 3 Ethnographic workplace studies and CSCW

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses s ethnographic workplace studies and computer-supported cooperative work. A community of practice (COP) approach allows focusing on the way work is accomplished as a collaborative enterprise. The communities of practice are naturally occurring groups that arise more or less spontaneously around a particular task, technology, or enterprise. COPs are ubiquitous and every person is a member of multiple communities, at work and elsewhere, dipping in and out of them as the situation requires. COP members may be co-located in face-to-face interaction, or they may work together remotely through a variety of communication technologies. A COP view of the work environment implies some shifts in the ways work practices are usually looked at. It means that attention is paid to the ways in which knowledge and meaning are constructed and distributed in particular work situations. A distinguishing feature of ethnographic work is that it is concerned with understanding what the world looks like from the point of view of participants. The distinction between emic and etic data is useful because much of work practice studies among management consultants is based on a purely etic framework that assumes certain structures and relationships without understanding what the work looks like from the point of view of participants.

A Technology for Supporting Knowledge Work: The RepTool

In this chapter we report on the RepTool,1 a computer based tool for the collection, analysis, and presentation of data about “workscapes.” Users of the tool collect relevant information about workplaces and workpractices in a central data structure on which the tool provides different views. Physical, social, and cognitive spaces in users’ or customers’ environments can be represented and analyzed. The RepTool supports systematic data collection and collaborative data analysis that can help people at all levels of an organization build a shared view of the formal and informal work processes they participate in. A tool for collaborative knowledge management, it nurtures intra- and inter-team conversations that can lead to an empirically grounded, shared view of current realities and potentially necessary changes.

Book Review: Gaining Access: A Practical and Theoretical Guide for Qualitative Researchers, Doing Cultural Anthropology: Projects for Ethnographic Data Collection

Both Gaining Access and Doing Cultural Anthropology are useful adjuncts to lower-division ethnographic methods courses. Gaining Access claims to be the only full treatment of entry into the field, and Doing Cultural Anthropology is a welcome update of the beloved Field Projects in Anthropology by Julia Crane and Michael Angrosino (1984) that has accompanied ethnographic methods courses for the past twenty years.