This article describes the use of stimulated recall interviews as a technique for investigating how people approach interactions in a number of different situations. In general, the technique I describe involves interviewing individuals by playing them audio or audiovisual recordings of their own behavior in social situations and discussing different aspects of those recorded interactions. Doing so can help us to understand what signals interactants understand as important, what signals they try to convey to others, and how they choose from various options to act upon the information they receive in interactions. Using the example of jazz jam sessions, I ask why it is that interactions can sometimes go smoothly and uneventfully, or sometimes break down completely. The stimulated recall interviews provide a valuable tool in helping the ethnographer to answer these kinds of questions.Keywords Ethnographic methods . Interviewing . Interaction . Jazz This article describes the use of stimulated recall interviews (SRI) as a technique for investigating how people coordinate their interactions in a number of different situations. In general, the technique I describe involves interviewing individuals while playing them audio or audiovisual recordings of their own behavior in social situations. Through participant-observation, ethnographers are able to gain unique insights into why people choose to act in certain ways in various situations. Traditional interviews and even autoethnographic techniques can help us to gain further understanding of the motivations and strategies underlying interactions and practices. But the ethnographer may be somewhat frustrated by the problems of memory and perspective inherent in these techniques. Motivations and rationales that informants describe retrospectively may not conform to those that they actually held in the moment of the experience. The technique of SRI brings informants a step closer to the moments in which they actually produce action. It gives

This article discusses the importance of several parameters of context integral to jazz musicians' ability to hear musical signs as meaningful, such as performers' individual backgrounds and the various other styles of music available in the aural landscape, and how those parameters influence what the musicians play. Several examples from an ongoing ethnography of jazz jam sessions suggest that context is constituted by several variables, that different variables may become salient at different times, and that different interactants vary in their ability to attend to these variables. This study thus extends and elaborates frame analysis by showing that, while an interaction frame of the sort described by Goffman (1974) may perdure, it is subject to change, and the nature of the context it provides for interactions can change whenever a new interaction is initiated.

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