Interviewing for Sense of Place

Abstract

James “Pete” Shortridge laid the groundwork for the study of place meanings by meticulously drawing the connections between the historical perceptions of places and the attitudes, policies, and very real economic consequences resulting from those perceptions. In so doing, he gave much-needed credibility and practical significance to humanistic geography, especially the study of place perceptions, regional identity, and sense of place. Though he and his students continue to produce work along these lines, humanistic geography lacks a substantial body of research methods that might encourage more geographers to take the humanistic plunge. I assert that geographers need to seriously develop and test a body of robust qualitative methods for assessing what places mean to people, and toward that goal, I present in this essay interview techniques developed and refined during a study of sense of place on the American High Plains. I include specific examples and personal experience to help demystify the process of qualitative fieldwork and to provide future field workers with detailed guidelines.

Keywords:

• qualitative methods
• field methods
• James “Pete” Shortridge
• sense of place
• American High Plains

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to John Patrick Harty, L. Scott Deaner, Steven M. Schnell, Douglas A. Hurt, Matthew R. Engel, and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Cultural Geography for comments that substantially improved the final version of this article.

Notes

1. Parts of this paper first appeared in the North American Geographer (de Wit 2005).

2. See Brian Black's Petrolia (2000, p. 81) for a treatment of the intriguing concept of a “sacrificial region.”

3. It turns out that such a phase of chaos and confusion is common in qualitative field studies (see Wax 1971; Rowles 1978; Hummon 1990; Whyte 1993; Basso 1996).

4. A researcher cannot just walk into a school and interview kids this way today. Any research involving minors requires parental consent and meeting especially stringent Institutional Review Board standards.

5. In 1987, Frank and Deborah Popper published a thought piece on the fate of the Great Plains (Popper and Popper 1987). They had noticed a marked decline of economic and social vitality in several Plains counties, and proposed that the federal government could, at some point in the future, buy up Plains property as people moved out, and eventually turn the land back to a natural grazing ground for wild animals such as buffalo. Although the Poppers meant only to stimulate thought on the future of the Plains, residents took the idea as a direct challenge to their personal worth and their way of life (see Matthews 1992).

6. Such a reflexive combination of data collection, writing, and analysis to work toward a synthesis is a common practice of ethnographers (Lofland 1984; Becker 1986; Agar 1990; Basso 1996), and is gaining recognition among geographers (DeLyser 2010).

7. I have successfully employed adaptations of the same techniques I used on the High Plains to contact and interview American Indians on reservations in North and South Dakota.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cary W. de Wit

Cary W. de Wit is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, 317 O'Neill Bldg, 905 N. Koyokuk Drive, Fairbanks, AK 99775. Phone: [phone]