The Challenges of Qualitative Interviewing

Finnish INVENT team member Riie Heikkilä and her colleague Anu Katainen recently published an article in The Sociological Review on the often challenging “counter-talk” in qualitative interviews on cultural practices. They identified three types of counter-talk: resisting the situation, resisting the topic, and resisting the interviewer – arguing that counter-talk should be given more importance as a key element of the qualitative interview and that culture is a particularly good topic to tease out different kinds of power relationships and moral boundaries. These will be relevant themes to INVENT, as all country teams will move to the phase of qualitative interviews. The article can be found open access at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380261211014467.