Tom Csordas, UCSD Anthropology
"Ways of Asking, Ways of Telling."

The interpretive understanding that can be derived from interviews is 
highly influenced by methods  of data collection, be they structured or 
semi-structured, ethnographic, clinical, life-history,  or survey interviews.  
This talk responds to calls for research into the interview process by  
analyzing data produced by two distinctly different types of interview, 
a semi-structured  ethnographic interview and the Structured Clinical 
Interview for DSM (SCID), conducted with  participants in the Navajo 
Healing Project.  We examine how the two interview genres shape the  
context of researcher-respondent interaction, and in turn influence how 
patients articulate their  lives and their experience in terms of illness, 
causality, social environment, temporality, and  self/identity.  We 
discuss the manner in which the two interviews impose narrative 
constraints on  interviewers and respondents, with significant implications 
for understanding the jointly  constructed nature of the interview process.  
The argument demonstrates both divergence and  complementarity in the 
construction of knowledge by means of these interviewing methods.