Beyond the romantic impulse for authentic data to coconstruction of meaning in interview-based educational research

Qualitative interviewing places emphasis on obtaining authentic data about respondent's subjective worlds through establishing rapport and empathy using strategies of researcher sensitivity with participants. Active interviewing suggests more attention should be paid to the coconstruction of meaning in the interview and qualitative researchers influenced by the discourse analytic tradition have directed attention to language and its constitutive role in producing such meanings. A dual consideration of the coconstruction of meaning enhanced by a discourse analytic focus on the language of representation is a potentially fruitful methodological fusion, which I explore here. In this paper I give examples from a recent focus group interview study of international student learning (Melles, 2004b), and in-depth interviews with ESL teachers (Melles, 2004a), which exemplify the constitutive role of language and the collaborative production of meaning in interviews.