Paradigm Wars Around Interview Methodologies: Constructionism and Postmodernism "on tap" or "on top"?/Inside Interviewing: New Lenses, New Concerns.

Two overlapping volumes extracted from the Handbook of interview research are seen as providing a considerable variety and depth of useful technical advice for qualitative researchers and a plethora of ideological warfare and confusion which helps nobody. Chapters on a range of types of more or less reluctant respondents and on phone and computer-aided interviewing (on and off the Web) are followed by chapters on transcription and on computer-aided (or not) qualitative analysis and interpretation from a variety of positions. Questions of representation are addressed. The review argues that post-modernist and constructivist practice can be a useful tactic in a struggle for a more reflexive and subtle researched understanding, but (as a philosophy competing for dominance) they make up a counter-productive "American ideology" which is self-contradictory, and personally and politically unhelpful. "On tap", yes; "on top", no! [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]