A while back my mom asked what interviewing is like. The answer is that it’s a lot harder than it seems like it should be. Anticipating how people are going to interpret your questions, and trying to rephrase them appropriately is tough. Rephrasing is surprisingly difficult in everyday conversation in general, because (British trained) Twi speakers use different kinds of phrases than Canadians. For example, today I was trying to say “he goes to school with me” in Twi, and when the person finally understood what I meant, they rephrased it as “he is your classmate” in English. It makes perfect sense, but it isn’t the phrase that jumps to mind.

From my interviews I had a question that was really painfully phrased about what conditions do people find are important to be in place in order for marriage counseling to be effective. That’s painful even for an English speaker. It took me a couple of interviews to come up with the streamlined and comprehensible “what circumstances make counseling a couple difficult?” The thing is, I was originally wondering if such and such or another circumstance might come up, and I phrased the question trying to ask that indirectly. Those kinds of questions are almost always disasters, but the trick is to figure out which broad and sensible questions will elicit the kinds of examples you are looking for, while allowing examples that you haven’t thought of already to emerge.

Anyway, it is getting easier, an so I have hopes that all will work out and I’ll have a dissertation to write at the end of this :)

Filed under: Anthropology

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