Bitesize highlights from the Breaking Binaries Research 'Twilight Zone' Qualitative Research Training Sessions #qualitativeresearch #researchtips #qualitativeanalysis #phdlife
It has been suggested that interviews play a variety of different roles in qualitative research, and these are related to different ontological and epistemological assumptions. Commonly, scholars distinguish between ‘neopositivist’ and ‘interpretative’ perspectives (Alvesson, 2003; Roulston, 2018), where the first implies the use of interviews to capture ‘facts’ based on a neutral objectivist perspective; the second implies a focus on capturing meaning and experiences through empathetic engagement with interviewees.
the interview has also been seen as a site for locally co-produced knowledge (Silverman, 2017). This approach - characterised as ‘constructionist’ (Gubrium et al., 2012; Roulston, 2018) - shifts to understanding how interviewees and interviewers discursively construct mutually acceptable accounts through interaction. Entrepreneurship scholars note how this fits well with the “uniqueness, heterogeneity, volatility, and mundanity of entrepreneurial phenomena” (Van Burg et al., 2020, p. 5).