Doing it with couples: the chattiness of the social revisited

Abstract

The article rehabilitates the joint couple interview as a research instrument for creating data about modern intimate relationships. It refutes the reservations against data retrieved from the ‘artificial’ situation of the interview by contextualizing it in the debate about the ‘chattiness’ or the ‘silence’ of the social. In doing so, it reflects on some of the specific features of the couple interview. The task of the interviewed couple matches the task of the sociologist: both are busy translating and putting things into words. These tasks are never straightforward: while the couple perpetually shifts between narrating a story about intimacy and enacting and performing intimacy, the sociologist is switching between treating the interview as a resource and treating it as a topic. A new referential problem appears in this process that is not confined to putting into words what was silent before, but consists in the performative creation of something that escapes language. From the perspective of this article, the couple interview can emerge as a legitimate research medium for the sociology of intimacy by eliciting and transforming its object, creating new knowledge about intimacy in the process.

Keywords:

• conversation analysis
• interview
• intimacy
• media
• relationships
• qualitative methodology

Notes on contributor

Martin Stempfhuber is Guest Lecturer at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He has worked mainly on diverse topics in the sociology of intimacy. Recent publications include Paargeschichten. Zur performativen Herstellung von Intimität (2012, Springer VS); (with Elke Wagner) ‘‘Disorderly Conduct:’ On the Unruly Rules of Public Communication in Social-Network-Sites.’ Global Networks. Special Issue on Networks of Disorder: An Introduction to Disorder Studies 13, no. 3.

Notes

1 I should note here that the project from which the examples in this article are drawn started with the heuristic definition of intimate relationships as ‘social relations in which more of the individual, unique attributes of each person […] become significant’ (Luhmann 1998, 13). As we will see, however, the methodological reflections will reveal some of the implicit assumptions even in a definition as abstract as that.

2 In order to avoid premature interpretations that are based solely on the premise of the gender of proper names, the interviewees are only represented by A and B, complicating preconceived notions of the difference between same-gender and cross-gender couples. Furthermore, the class status of the ‘competent narrators’ is only of minor interest for the methodological argument of this article (for that see Illouz 1997; Stefansen and Aarseth 2011; Stempfhuber 2012).