Working Side by Side? Interaction and Interview Data in Research on Household Conflicts

Abstract

The article discusses the possibilities and challenges of combining conversation analysis and ethnography in the study of everyday family life. We argue that such a combination requires the decision whether to prioritise interaction data or ethnographic (in particular, interview) data in the analysis. We present a conversation analytic case study of how household work is commonly brought up in the interactions of one couple and bring this to bear on a re-analysis of a possible conflict situation originally described in the ethnographic analysis by Klein, Izquierdo, and Bradbury (2007), published in this journal. While the findings of the two analyses converge, they inform us about different dimensions of couple interaction. The ethnographic analysis is focused on participants' experiences, and the conversation analysis is focused on participants' practices. We conclude that the methodological decision to prioritise interaction or interview data has consequences for the kind of questions we can ask.

Keywords:

• context
• conversation analysis
• couple interaction
• ethnography
• household work
• sequential analysis

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from a grant awarded to the first author by the British Academy for the project “Sharing responsibility in conversation: English couples dealing with everyday chores,” SG-49289.

Notes

1. We will use the term “ethnographic data” to refer to any information that is not available to the researcher within the interactions that are analysed. The type of ethnographic data which is most prominent in the paper by Klein and colleagues, and which we discuss most here, are interview data. However, this should not lead to the impression that we are equating ethnography with ‘doing interviews.’

2. More recently, work has begun to also address positive processes in interactions between partners, such as intimacy (Roberts & Greenberg 2002).

3. For more information on knowledge claims being embodied in assessments, see Pomerantz (1984).

4. Recordings of the fragments discussed in this paper can be accessed at www.ca-across-cultures.org.