Supplementary Interviewing Techniques to Maximize Output in Free Listing Tasks

Free listing is an important ethnographic tool for defining semantic domains. However, when informants free list items from a particular domain, they often do not mention all items they know because they forget items and/or do not understand that they should list exhaustively. In this article, the a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inField methods Vol. 14; no. 1; pp. 108 - 118
Main Author Brewer, Devon D.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Thousand Oaks, CA Sage Publications 01.02.2002
Subjects
Data analysis
Data collection
Ethnographic research
Ethnography
Interviewers
Interviews
Methodology (Data Collection)
Research methodology
Research methods
Research Responses
Semantics
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Summary:Free listing is an important ethnographic tool for defining semantic domains. However, when informants free list items from a particular domain, they often do not mention all items they know because they forget items and/or do not understand that they should list exhaustively. In this article, the author reviews results from research on three supplementary interviewing techniques to encourage full responding and enhance recall in such tasks (nonspecific prompting, reading back to the informant the items he or she free listed, and using free-listed items as semantic cues). These methods increase substantially the number of items elicited from individual informants and the number of items in a domain identified from informants in the aggregate. Moreover, these techniques do not require the interviewer to have any prior domain knowledge to be effective.
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ISSN:1525-822X
1552-3969
DOI:10.1177/1525822X02014001007