Listening for Culture

Abstract

There is an inextricable link between humans and their cultural environments, as each reciprocally creates and is created by the other. This chapter discusses interviewing as a critical methodological tool for understanding culture as intricately intertwined with subjective meaning making and identity processes. We start from the premise that the stories gathered through research-based interviews serve as repositories of shared cultural knowledge as experienced and interpreted by individuals. After briefly examining the historical position of interviewing in the field of psychology, the chapter will draw on examples from the authors’ own research in the United States and Germany to offer guidance on (a) designing interview protocols that allow for cultural analysis, and (b) conducting analysis to see culture through interview data. Empirically guided suggestions for fostering researcher reflexivity, acknowledging power, and dismantling hierarchies are provided throughout the chapter, all in service of truly “hearing” culture in the stories participants tell.

Exploring whether and how Black and White parents talk with their children about race: M(ai)cro race conversations about Black Lives Matter.

“…This final level of interpretation is essential to the analysis, doing the interpretive work of making sense of the codes and drawing systematic meaning from them (Wolcott, 1994). Here, using m(ai)cro framework, we focus less on the specific content of each response and more on whether and how the codes function to reinforce or disrupt societal narratives and systems of racism (Rogers, Moffitt, Jones, & McLean, 2021).…”

Race Talk During the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election: Emerging Adults’ Critical Consciousness and Racial Identity in Context

“…We decided to code our data through the lenses of critical consciousness and racial identity based on their relevance to what participants wrote about in response to the prompts. We therefore engaged a hybrid deductive-inductive coding structure, following the three levels of coding and analysis outlined by Wolcott (1994) and expanded on by Rogers, Moffitt, and Jones (2021), with an emphasis on analyzing and interpreting participants’ stories in relation to their sociocultural context. Each round of coding included an iterative process: going back and forth between the data and our codebook as we worked to comprehensively code all responses.…”