Status Updates From Thinking Through Methods: A...

A great interviewer can, I admit, often walk into an interaction without a script and leave with good data.
Paul Lazarsfeld, one of the founders of modern survey analysis, used to say, 'if you want to know something about people, why don't you ask them?'

The problem with the contextual nature of the interview is that we can't take what it produces as if it were just some dump of what is in the interviewees' heads. Rather, these products are a response to specific tasks that we give respondents, and we have to have a clear and accurate theory of this interactive process.