Getting Intimate in Interviews? Reflections on the Possibility to Observe Interaction in Couple Interviews

• In Event: 155 - Regular Session. Qualitative Methodology

Abstract

The paper rehabilitates the couple interview as a research instrument for creating “ethnographic” data about modern intimate relationships. It refutes the reservations against data retrieved from the “artificial” situation of the interview by contextualizing it in the debate about the “chattiness” or the “silence” of the social. In doing so, it reflects on some of the specific features of the couple interview. The ethnomethods of the interviewed couple are matched with the task of the sociologist: both are busy translating and putting things into words. These tasks are never straightforward: while the couple persistently shifts from narrating a story about intimacy into enacting and performing intimacy, the sociologist is switching between treating the interview as a resource and treating it as a topic. A new referential problem appears in this process that is not confined to putting into words what was silent before, but consists in the performative creation of something that escapes language. From the perspective of this article, the couple interview can emerge as a legitimate research medium for the sociology of intimacy by eliciting and transforming its object, creating new knowledge about intimacy in the process.

Authors

• Martin Stempfhuber, University of Hamburg

• Elke Wagner, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz