Text-Types and Their Analysis in Qualitative Interview Research: A Methodological Update

Abstract

In his work on narrative interviews, Fritz SCHÜTZE introduced the concept of text-types, which plays an important role in various interview procedures in the German-speaking area today. It is employed by researchers in order to generate a certain methodologically preferred quality of interview responses and to identify corresponding transcript passages during data analysis. However, the continued popularity of text-types is offset by three fundamental problems: 1. the neglect of the interactive character of text-type production, 2. the limited analytical value of formal language markers and 3. ambiguities regarding the taxonomy of text-types. These problems arise from the lack of systematic work on text-types and their determination within the German methodological discourse since SCHÜTZE's (and KALLMEYER's) significant contributions in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as  from the ignorance of relevant contributions from conversational linguistics. In this article, we make an empirically grounded proposal to address these problems by resorting to the conversation-analytic framework and analytical tool "globality and locality in the organization of jointly constructed units" (GLOBE), which has not yet been utilized in interview research. With this enhancement of the method, determining text-types becomes fruitful for a variety of research contexts even beyond narrative interviews.