Internalised-Other interviewing: attending to voices of the 'other&apos (original) (raw)

Karl Tomm’s Internalized Other Interviewing: From Theory to Practice

2021

Over the last 40 years, the Canadian psychiatrist and family therapist Karl Tomm has been a key contributor to postmodern developments in family therapy (Collins & Tomm, 2009; Strong et al., 2008; Tomm, Hoyt, & Madigan, 2001). This dissertation traces the people, ideas, and practices that have influenced Tomm\u27s approach, providing an in- depth examination of the method he developed for putting his ideas into practice: Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). A systemic, relational approach to the practice of postmodern family therapy uses language as a means to create change. Family therapists routinely use different types of questions to ask clients about other people in their lives. Direct, information-seeking questions privilege objectivity, whereas interpersonal perception questions privilege subjective assumptions and allow for new possibilities to arise. The IOI approach offers a third way to ask questions that privilege subject-dependent assumptions and embodied knowledge (K...

Insider or outsider, both or neither: some dilemmas of interviewing in a cross-cultural setting

Geoforum, 1999

This paper contributes to the growing literature on methods and techniques for conducting qualitative research in economic geography, as well as to recent feminist debates on the impact that relationships of power between researchers and their informants have on the rigor of the ®ndings of qualitative research. Drawing upon my own experiences whilst conducting interviews with managers and workers in information processing companies in Jamaica, I will examine the ways that inter-cultural perceptions, interactions and representations in¯uenced the ®eldwork process, and their ultimate eect on my interpretation and writing of the ®nal text. This paper includes that because of the dynamic way in which identities and their attendant power relations are created and transformed during business interviews, uncertainty will necessarily remain a residual in the evaluation and interpretation of information received. It argues that recognizing and naming these uncertainties is an important step towards not only establishing rigor in the research process, but also to displacing the indomitable authority of the author. Ó Geoforum 30 (1999) 337±350 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum 0016-7185/99/$ -see front matter Ó 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 0 1 6 -7 1 8 5 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 2 5 -1

Eight challenges for interview researchers

The open-ended interview is the preeminent data generation technique in methodological traditions as disparate as ethnography, phenomenology (in its different forms), psychoanalysis, narrative psychology, grounded theory, and (much) discourse analysis. Our aim in this chapter is to make the case that interviewing has been too easy, too obvious, too little studied, and too open to providing a convenient launch pad for poor research. We will argue that interview research will be made better if it faces up to a series of eight challenges that arise in the design, conduct, analysis, and reporting of qualitative interviews. Some research studies already face up to some of these challenges; few studies face up to all of them. We will make our case strongly and bluntly with the aim of provoking debate where not enough has taken place. These challenges are overlapping, but we have separated them in the way we have for clarity. It is important to emphasize that our aim is not to criticize interviews but to make them better.

Varieties of interviewing: Epistemic and doxastic

2007

In what follows, I shall address a seemingly very simple question: Could we, by means of qualitative research interviews, gain knowledge? A first reaction to this question is likely to be: “What an insult! What do you think we have been doing all these years, talking to people about their experiences, desires, and opinions? Do you have the nerve to question whether we have gained knowledge along the way? Of course we have!”