A Reflexive Pragmatist Reading of Alvesson's Interpreting Interviews

Authors

Brian T. Gearity, The University of Southern MississippiFollow

Abstract

Remember those interviews you collected for that qualitative research study? How did you address issues of interviewee power, impression management and rationality? Was it "trustworthy"? Really? In Interpreting Interviews, Mats Alvesson summarizes the current state of thought on interviews as a tool for qualitative data collection and challenges this framework as simplistic and failing to account for its complexities as a social act. Alvesson argues for a critical consciousness and pragmatic approach to interviews. This review blurs genres from autoethnography and more traditional approaches while taking Alvesson's approach, reflexive pragmatism, to its logical consequences. As a whole, Interpreting Interviews is timely, intellectually stimulating, and the latest (un)fortunate wrench in the qualitative research machine.

Keywords

Interpreting, Interviews, Empiricism, Critique, Reflexivity, and Qualitative Research

Publication Date

3-1-2011

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2011.1077

Recommended APA Citation

Gearity, B. T. (2011). A Reflexive Pragmatist Reading of Alvesson's Interpreting Interviews. The Qualitative Report, 16(2), 609-613. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2011.1077