?and the way it?s worded makes it??: Discursive Co-Construction of Data in a Research Interview.

Given its dual role as both describer and producer of cultural realities, university-based social research warrants ethnographic study as a communication industry unto itself. A critical perspective on the practical ?doing? of research frequently focuses on abstract methodological arguments, such as those over qualitative versus quantitative research, rather than the lived experiences of researchers and subjects within the organizational constraints of research institutions. "Doing a survey,? either face to face or over the phone, is a particular social event for which there are tacit conversational rules. In this paper, I analyze face-to-face administration of closed-ended survey questions as unique speech events through which meaning is constructed and privileged. Using the methods of interactional sociolinguistics, I will analyze the interaction between researcher and subject in two taped examples of survey administration. Through discussion of these particular events, I will demonstrate that the practice of identifying and gathering data can be seen as the outcome of negotiation and collaboration between researcher and respondent. Once the answers have been agreed upon, they are encoded as research data, but the collaborative framework within which data was obtained is often disregarded. The regularities of this framework are what concern me here, and bringing theoretical perspectives from discourse analysis to bear to the survey research process is my goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]