Qualitative Interviews mit Kindern (German Edition)

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Diese Studie geht der Frage nach, wie Kinder ihre Mehrsprachigkeit erleben. In einem qualitativen Untersuchungsdesign kommen dazu mehrsprachige Grundschulkinder selbst zu Wort. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Read more Read less. Be the first to review this item Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Start reading Kinder sprechen ueber on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers.

You see, at that time, I often travelled back to Turkey by train, finding myself together with Greeks, Yugoslavs, Turks and Bulgarians, all migrant workers. Their common language was German. They would sing love songs and then try to translate them from their own language into German. And this, as I now realised, was the language of some five million Gastarbeiter. If I wanted to write a play about their experience, and I did, I knew it would have to be written in this new language.

A few words on the issue of translation: I know that there are legitimate questions as to the translatability of such an extempore interview presentation—questions which should be asked and will be asked. I am convinced though that it is possible and makes sense for researchers to focus on the English text, found in the Appendix in order to demonstrate how they tackle the problem of understanding the story which the woman is telling.

Translating the interview from German into English meant trying to make this story available to a larger group of people participating in the discourse on biographical research, but, of course, such a translation into the most widely used language in the social sciences has its drawbacks, too.

The translation itself is nothing more, but also nothing less, than a first attempt to understand the narrative and to put this down in writing. At one point I stopped my constant silent negotiating with myself and had the feeling that I had done a rather good job and could say "that's it," but I also knew that I would continue to make little changes here and there again if I decided to examine the text anew. I had a foretaste of this when I was confronted with the textual analyses of a number of the contributors to this issue.

The following is an example of the process of partially revising the translation. Maybe some of the readers who are familiar with German will disagree with me, but I think this translation makes sense if you take the context into account: The interviewee emphasizes that she acquired her German in ways which do not have anything to do with a formal school setting "the right way".

But I did not find an English expression which could express this vagueness and so I chose the one interpretation which definitely fits into this context. This is the translation of an interview with a woman who is talking about herself in a language which she acquired as an adult. I translated the text into a language which is not my first language either. This made me feel uneasy once in a while. There were no sequences during which I asked myself what she could have meant. There are some features of her oral presentation which show that she is not a native speaker, 8 but this does not create any difficulties for communication between interviewee and interviewers and for understanding the transcription.

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In translating the interview I did not engage in any systematic artificial exercise of reproducing or imitating her minor syntactical "mistakes"—"mistakes" in a normative sense. This would have been an impossible task because of the syntactical differences between German and English and such a forced imitation would have also created an uncomfortable distance between myself as a native speaker constantly discovering, evaluating and mimicking minor "mistakes" and the woman whose impressive story I wanted to make available to other social scientists who do not know German.

But I also had to constantly negotiate with myself how I could do justice to her specific presentation and communicative style without polishing it for the sake of creating a "nice" sounding translation. In the end, I think I can live with the result.

If you turn to the interview in the Appendix you will notice that I did not correct the speaker's mixing of tenses where she "should" have stayed with one tense , and I did not get rid of self-interruptions, anacoluthons, new starts and hesitation markers "eh" in order to convey the qualities of spoken language and off-the-cuff story telling. Such features are typical of any oral extempore presentations and do not have anything to do with the fact that the speaker in this case uses a language which she had not acquired as a child. As will become apparent in several contributions to this issue cf.

Of course, the placement of the hesitation markers cannot be exactly like in the German text because of the syntactical differences between German and English, but I paid attention to them nevertheless. If you turn to the text in the Appendix you will find that I left out the interviewers' frequent "uh"s and similar sounds. If an interviewer asks a question, makes a comment or joins in laughter, I italicized this in a simple bracket.

So a reader can distinguish between the narrator's and the two interviewers' statements quite easily. In the original transcription no distinction was made between the utterances of either interviewer. Sometimes I use a simple bracket because I added a word or a few words in order to make sure that the meaning gets communicated; a simple literal translation would not have made enough sense in such a context.

Sometimes simple brackets indicate that I am not totally sure of the translation. I use double brackets for indicating paralinguistic phenomena in the interviewee's speech mostly laughter in her case and for adding a short commentary on my translation occasionally.

Short pauses are indicated by two dots, somewhat longer ones by three or four dots. I translated the whole transcription of the interview: In editing the text I deviated from the common way of presenting transcriptions: I formed paragraphs for the sake of the readability of the text, i. Subsequently, when the interviewee is arguing with herself, I also tried to take the dynamics of her unfolding argumentation into account by constructing paragraphs.

I have already alluded to some features of this interview. If you read the text and are not familiar with this type of interview you might wonder at the lack of further questions after the interviewers have initially asked their interviewee to tell her life history. Are there no questions until the end of her narrative? There are no questions in between —even though, in retrospect, the initial request of the interviewers does not appear favorable in terms of generating extempore narratives of whole life histories: Oftentimes formulations like "something about your life" and the listing of single items for a narrative presentation add up to a difficult task for the story teller—there is too much to remember if she or he wants to be cooperative.

But in this case—after a somewhat rough start—the interviewee really turns back to the memory of her childhood days and her story unfolds up to the present: That's the whole life" cf. Because of its widespread use in biographical research many social scientists tend to equate a "narrative interview" with an "autobiographical narrative interview," i. Such an assumption ignores the history of the method and the fact that narrative interviews have been used for handling quite different research problems in the study of social processes, e.

I think it is important to keep in mind that theoretical and methodological concerns have been constantly intertwined in this kind of work. When trying to reconstruct this line of research one has to take into account the situation in West German sociology at the beginning of the s: Many younger researchers and students had become critical of mainstream positivist research under the influence of the "debate on positivism" and the student movement of But for quite some time this criticism had little or no influence on the development of new methods of empirical research.

A group which was especially interested in introducing interpretive approaches in the social sciences in Germany as well as in developing new qualitative research procedures was a team of younger sociologists at the University of Bielefeld. He sensed that these methodological difficulties had something to do with the fact that sociological theorizing proceeded quite separately from a concrete observation of social phenomena and that there was something basically wrong with the relationship between sociological theory and sociological data, that there was "no transparent, controllable relationship of translation.

He argued that standardized interviews were experienced as something strange by the interviewees, as something which did not have anything to do with their everyday communication and forced them into a passive role. This interest differed from the traditional use of and reliance on off-the-cuff story telling in interpretive sociology: Of course, Chicago sociologists and later generations of Symbolic Interactionists and ethnographically minded social scientists in general had routinely elicited extempore narratives from their informants and had made use of these stories in their research accounts, but most of them had done so in a more or less intuitive way paying no systematic attention to their formal features.

But of course they had no interest in using such insights into formal features to develop new research methods for tackling sociological problems which appeared "traditional" from their perspective. While he stayed interested in substantive matters—i. The idea was that a by systematically focusing on the how one could arrive at a deeper understanding of the what: I think that such a creative merging of different traditions was easier in a setting which did not have much to do with the animosities and misunderstandings which had developed among American representatives of the different interpretive approaches at that time.

There was no need to take sides. One was free to appreciate the specific contributions and analytical resources of these traditions to discover what they still had in common and to make use of it Arbeitsgruppe Bielefelder Soziologen Since another student, Christine BRUEHNE, and I were drawn into this project as his research assistants, I still have quite vivid memories of the development of this style of collecting data.

The development and refinement of this type of interviewing was not an arm-chair invention. The research focused on communities—villages and small towns—that were in a prolonged state of crisis due to large scale bureaucratically enforced regional reforms which were devised in the state capitals. Villages and towns which had been independent for centuries were forced to merge with neighboring villages or towns. Often traditional rival villages and towns which had been part of other territorial units with their distinct history and their distinct characteristics, such as religious affiliation, lost their collective identity or were at least threatened with losing it.

It seemed the best way to learn something about these processes was to let the actors in this drama tell about their experiences without unnecessary outside interference. The idea was to use a sufficiently innocent topic as a question for generating narratives: We conducted these interviews in two newly formed villages and one newly formed town.

When choosing this topic we were well aware that this appeared amusing and even trivial for outsiders—and especially "serious" sociologists—but it was a serious matter for the local people and their representatives. At the same time it was something which narrators could talk about with some distance: These were battles of the recent past. I want to mention how we proceeded when doing these narrative interviews. This form of interviewing is firmly grounded in members' everyday competencies to narrate their own experiences, 12 but of course it is also a deviation from situations of everyday story telling, because it has particular features of a research procedure.

Furthermore, since it is a professional project problems and paradoxes arise as in all types of professional work which have to be handled in a sensible and responsible manner. At this point it is possible to mention a few aspects which turned out to be important in the course of this field research on community power. I prefer to formulate them in a general way and in the present tense since they are still relevant in studies which are based on this procedure: It is necessary that a sufficient trust relationship develops between researcher s and informant before and during the interview.

This also involves, as we discovered, a narrative presentation of self of the researcher s: It is also important that the prospective informant develops some interest in co-operating in this project, i. The researcher has to inform the interviewee about features of this particular interview format cf. And of course the interviewee has to be assured that her or his information will be treated in a strictly confidential manner. A generative question has to be formulated in such a way that it can elicit an extempore narrative of the interviewee's involvement in a complex of events and experiences that were relevant for her or him, in contrast to eliciting descriptive or argumentational presentations like "accounts" in the sense of SCOTT and LYMAN , which primarily aim at saving one's face as self-justifications, excuses or "sad tales" as GOFFMAN , p.

Of course, it is necessary that there is a sufficiently marked topic: Please let me also know if I may cite your mails. The response rate was with about 20 mails comparably poor when considering that about subscribers belong to the lists, some of them members in both. Additionally, few persons explicitly agreed to be cited, so I decided to anonymize all answers and to slightly correct orthography if necessary.

A little "qualitative hit list" resulted from a request I made in one of the lists and includes important books that some respondents mentioned. Instead of expanding on this, let me just say that sociologists and educational researchers often preferred mentioning books with a clear disciplinary focus, while psychologists—maybe because of the relatively sparse equipment in their own discipline, tended to make more use of neighboring disciplines. Exceptions are contributions we refer to and which are published in this FQS Issue in English language and some books we will mark in our list of references.

In German we use "object" in a way similar to the English term "subject", while the German term "subject" stresses activity of a person. So while "object of research" mostly refers to the issues and topics which research is concerned with, "research subject" is the researcher himself or herself. In this text we additionally use the term "research participants" for those who are being researched.

Some problematic implications of the idea of a so-called object-adequacy should only be shortly outlined: As knowledge about a research field develops during doing the research, it is impossible to rely on characteristics of this research field by deciding which methods to use, as these characteristics are not clearly known at the beginning of the research process. Thirdly the idea of object-adequacy stems from a methodological context which thought dividing into subject and object of research not to be problematical, a context that assumed that subject and object exist and that the aim of research is to reveal objects characteristics during a process not contaminated by the researcher and the research procedures.

Choosing a paradigm that accepts the construction of meaning within a mutual process means to refute this idea of a pre-existing separation see more detailed MRUCK Already in DEVEREUX, elaborating on the observer-observed-dependency, regards such "disturbances" as "cornerstones for the scientific inquiry of human behavior": We will briefly touch on the importance of the idea that "talking about others means talking about oneself", and that the "construction of 'the other' Re-Analysis" and will give some insight into the international and interdisciplinary state of discussion.

Arbeitsgruppe Bielefelder Soziologen Eds. Alltagswissen, Interaktion und gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit [Everyday knowledge, interaction, and social reality]. Kommunikative Sozialforschung [Communicative social research].

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Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text. The crisis of ethnographical representation]. Structure and changes of empirical social research]. Relativity and validity in social research]. Soziale Welt, Sonderband 3. Wissenschaft als Kontext — Kontexte der Wissenschaft [Science as context—contexts of sciences]. Theoretische und methodologische Grundlinien unseres Forschungsstils [Theoretical and methodological basic assumptions in our research approach]. In Franz Breuer Ed. Grundlagen, Methoden und Anwendungen eines Forschungsstils pp.

Schritte des Arbeitsprozesses unter unserem Forschungsstil [Steps in the working process of our research approach]. Probleme human- und sozialwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnismethoden: A lot of confusion—some suggestions]. In Norbert Groeben Ed. Qualitative studies on conversation and metaphor, planning and gesture].

Angst und Methode in den Verhaltenswissenschaften [From anxiety to method in the Behavioral Sciences]. Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache [Genesis and development of a scientific fact] ed. Basics, concepts, methods, and applications].

Systematical triangulation of perspectives as a strategy for validating qualitative data and interpretations].

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Qualitative Interviews in der Sozialforschung. Zur Entwicklung der empirischen Sozialforschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland [The development of empirical social research in the Federal Republic of Germany]. ZUMA-Nachrichten, 35 18 , Qualitative Sozialforschung [Qualitative social research]. Denkverbote gibt es nicht! Vorschlag zur interpretativen Auswertung kommunikativ gewonnener Daten [Wrong ways of thinking don't exist!

Editorial Reviews

Suggestions towards the interpretation of communicatively constructed data]. Zur Geschichte der Feldforschung in der Volkskunde [The history of field research in ethnic studies]. In Utz Jeggle Ed. Qualitative Methoden in der Kulturanalyse pp. Perspectives for an object-adequate research practice]. Induktive Diagnostik als gegenstandsangemessene psychologische Grundlagenforschung [Inductive Diagnostic as an object-adequate method for research in General Psychology].

Grundfragen, Verfahrensweisen, Anwendungsfelder pp. Komparative Kasuistik [Comparative Casuistic]. Kardorff, Ernst von Qualitative Sozialforschung — Versuch einer Standortbestimmung [Qualitative social research—Attempting to define a position]. Sociological Research Online , 2 2 , http: Die Archivierung qualitativer Interviewdaten.

Research ethics and data protection as barriers for re-analysis? Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis. Zur Anthropologie der Naturwissenschaft [The manufacture of knowledge. An anthropology of the Natural Sciences]. Soziologie und Ethnologie [Sociology and Ethnology]. Ethnologie als Sozialwissenschaft , Handbuch Erziehungswissenschaftliche Biographieforschung [Handbook of biographical research in the Educational Sciences].

Die Struktur wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen [The structure of scientific revolutions]. Qualitative Sozialforschung , Vol. Interpretation und Validierung biographischer Interviews [Interpretation and validation of biographical interviews]. Krise der Psychologie oder Psychologie der Krise?

Psychoanalyse in der Sozialforschung [Psychoanalysis in social research]. Sozialwissenschaftliche Literaturrundschau , 12, Marotzki, Winfried; Meister, Dorothee M. Zum Bildungswert des Internet [Educational value of the internet]. A guide towards qualitative thinking] 2. Grundlagen und Techniken [Qualitative content analysis. Basics and techniques] 6.

Entwicklung und Wandel von Forschungsinteressen. Theoretical and empirical investigations]. Theoretical, methodological and empirical inquiries]. The back view of Psychological research reports. Qualitative Forschung [Qualitative research]. Glossar qualitativer Verfahren [Glossary of qualitative methods]. Dialogische Hermeneutik [Dialogical Hermeneutics].

Alkohol im Alltag und Metaphernanalyse [On dead ends, inner beasts and other men]. Biographieforschung und narratives Interview [Biographical research and the Narrative Interview]. Neue Praxis, 13 , Zur Konstitution gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit und ihrer Erforschung [The constitution of social reality and its inquiry]. Grundlagen qualitativer Sozialforschung [Basics of qualitative research, grounded theory, procedures and techniques].

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