Recent Radical Criticism of Interview Studies: any implications for the sociology of education?

This article discusses the implications of radical criticism of interview studies for educational sociology. A recurrent theme in commentary on the sociology of education bemoans the tendency for it to become cut off from the parent discipline, charging it with failing to draw on developments there. A recent variation on this theme is Delamont et al.'s criticism of British ethnographic work in education for failing to keep pace with the latest methodological developments, as portrayed in Denzin and Linconl's moment model; though they are also critical of the development character of that model. Whatever the accuracy of this charge in general, and irrespective of whether keeping up is always desirable, it is true that there has been recent work in the field of methodology that has had little noticeable impact on qualitative work in the sociology of education. A key example is what was referred to as the radical critique of interviews. This critique focuses on what is regarded as increasing over-dependence among qualitative researchers on interview data, and above all their use of such data as a window on the world and/or on the minds of informants. Furthermore, some of the critics argue that this privileging of interview material reflects a wider trend: the emergence of the interview society. Concern over the status and use of interview data is by no means new, of course. However, the grounds for this concern, and the conclusion drawn, have changed somewhat. In the past, the focus was on the issue of how do we know the informant is telling the truth, on the incompleteness of interview data and on the difference between what people say and what they do.