| dc.description.abstract | Naturalization of an interview situation consists in operations shaping this situation in such a way as to make it resemble a natural, everyday conversation, and to introduce into it actual systems of reference and current ways of perception of people and things. Naturalization appeals to the former positive social experience and constitutes an attempt at making the interview situation similar to well-known and approved social situations.
The problem of naturalization of interview situations is discussed in the context of methodological reconstruction of operations applied in the research on the attitudes of youth and adults towards material goods. In the interviews, each respondent was supposed to define: (1) his own attitude towards material goods, (2) the attitude of his close friends and peers as well as of his generation at large, (3) the attitude of his parents or children.
Experience obtained from pilot interviews has revealed the need for naturalization of the interview situation by reason of: (1) delicacy and difficulty of the domain of interrogation, leading to the informational dissonance (e.g. discrepancy between demand for information and the scope of information obtained in interviews), (2) delicacy and difficulty inherent in the social situation of interviews resulting from generational dissonance (age difference between an interviewer and an interviewee) leading to conflicting role relationships in interviews.
Naturalization of the interview situation was conceived as a set of operations leading to the informational consonance through reduction of factors disturbing and distorting the process of information gathering. The following operations were undertaken: (1) early familiarization of respondents with the research situation (before the interview itself), (2) choice of such places and conditions of interviewing as are neutral in respect of the domain of research, (3) levelling of age difference between the interviewer and the interviewee, (4) emphasis on the respondent’s competence in the domain of research (in the introduction to the interview and in its course), (5) preparatory part of the interview not related directly to the domain of research (fulfilling the fatic function, i.e. facilitating social contact), (6) integration of all phases of research (initial contacts, preparatory phase of the interview and the interview itself) by means of a special link-theme. | |
