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Learn more at Author Central. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. A bis Z der Interventionen in der Paar- und Familientherapie: Available for download now. Only 3 left in stock - order soon. German Edition Oct 22, Only 6 left in stock - order soon. So it becomes clear what the official institutionalized reality is as well as to what extent the expert acts in a field of conflict between perceived institutional directives and his personal interpretation of rules.
Questions about decisions made or processes having taken place eventually allow a reconstruction of the logic and procedure of the decision-making process. Follow-up questions should as far as possible evoke accounts of concrete events or generate narrations. The dynamics of the situation in expert interviewing, like with other types of interviews and other reactive methods, is decisively determined by the mutual perceptions of the participants.
In expert interviewing both the status relation and gender relation play a prominent role. Regarding the status relation it has been stated above that the outcome of the interview is co-determined by whether the expert sees the interviewer as a competent interlocutor. The ascription of competence to the interviewer is based not only on his behaviour, but also on aspects of his formal status.
On the other hand the experts might be sceptical about young researchers who do not yet hold a higher degree, in particular in cases of a high status of the expert. This seems to play a role in management research. In interviews with executive personnel, Trinczek , p. In most fields of research the experts under study are males despite all changes in gender-relations. This is to be understood in connection with the development of professions and particularly applies to the functional elites of society Littig, Abels and Behrens report how they utilized this constellation in interviews with male experts: In many talks with experts we claim to have received important pieces of information just because men find it necessary to explain matters through and through or to come up with facts which we as women in an ascribed lower status are not believed to be capable of getting right.
Sequentiality of statements within a single interview is not of interest. The context as commonly shared by the experts largely ensures the comparability of the interviews; in addition, comparability is guaranteed through the use of the topic guide. This guideline reflects the relevant topics against a horizon of other possible topics and serves to focus the interviews.
As a general rule interviews are being taped. Transcriptions of thematically relevant passages are a prerequisite for the analysis. A transcription of the whole recording — in contrast to working with biographical interviews — is not standard. The transcription is also less detailed; prosodic and paralinguistic elements are notated only to a certain extent. The sequencing of the text according to thematic units is easily done, as it were, in the manner of commonsense reasoning.
The next step in condensing the material is to order the paraphrased passages thematically. The interpreter keeps close to the text and adopts the terminology of the interviewee. At best a term or phrase can be used as it is. Whether one or more coding categories are attached to a passage depends on how many topics are addressed. The frame of reference at this stage in the analysis still is the single interview; condensations, typifications, abstractions remain within its horizon. From this stage onward the analysis surpasses the single passage in the text.
The logic of the procedure corresponds to that of coding, but now thematically comparable passages from different interviews are tied together cf. Category formation close to the language of data has to be maintained; theoretical abstraction should be refrained from, if possible. Since in the course of the thematic comparison a large amount of data is condensed, it is essential to check and if necessary revise coding decisions.
The results of the thematic comparison have continuously to be checked in the light of the other relevant passages in the interviews, to examine whether they are sound, complete and valid. It is only now that a distant reviewing of the texts and the terminology of the interviewees takes place. Features shared and features differing from interview to interview are elaborated and categorized by drawing on the theoretical knowledge base. The specific characteristics of the commonly shared knowledge of experts are condensed and categorizations formulated.
The process of category formation implies a subsumption of phenomena under a term claiming general validity, on the one hand, and a reconstruction of this term as valid for the reality under scrutinization, on the other hand. The level of abstraction is that of empirical generalization. Statements refer to structures of expert knowledge. While establishing links to the academic discourse, the generalizations remain restricted to the empirical data, even though a terminology is used which cannot be found in the material itself. The researcher arranges the categories according to their internal relations.
When representing the results of research the empirically generalized findings are framed by a theoretically inspired perspective. In this reconstructive process the meaning structures of the field of action under study are connected to form typologies and theories — overcoming loose ends and unconnected findings so far handled pragmatically. Regarding data analysis all stages of the analytical process should be passed through and shortcuts be avoided. What is more, while the process of interpretation is progressing it often proves necessary to go back to an earlier stage in order to check the adequacy of generalizations as grounded in data.
This recursiveness is the typical merit of this approach. Experts and Changes in Knowledge Production 37 Notes 1. As we showed elsewhere, the expert interview is one of the most frequently applied methods of empirical research, both as a method in its own right and in the framework of a triangulation of methods.
It is applied particularly in industrial sociology, and organizational, educational, and policy research. Although the expert interview has been used frequently for a long time it was hardly ever reflected methodologically and with a view to the characteristics as compared with those of other methods of interviewing. Correspondingly, on checking through relevant handbooks on methods it turns out that the expert interview is at best mentioned as an exploratory method. It is widely agreed to locate the expert interview in the context of qualitative social research methodology.
Our article is written in this line of thought which however is not unchallenged but criticized as an unjustified option. Similar Pfadenhauer , pp. Our comments are based on previous articles on expert interview and expert knowledge Meuser and Nagel, , , , In this article our former considerations are discussed in the light of changes in knowledge production and extended with a view to the impact on the analysis of expert knowledge.
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Doubts about our conceptualization of the expert interview as a method in its own right are expressed by Deeke , Kassner and Wassermann In previous articles we treated this contextualization of the expert and expert knowledge somewhat briefly; meanwhile the changes in knowledge production have become more visible and require to be dealt with — which we shall do in this article.
It will be examined whether and in which way the processes of societal change — discussed as newly emerging knowledge cultures and forms of knowledge production — are challenging a revision of concepts drawn from the sociology of knowledge. See Gibbons and others on the change of forms and cultures of knowledge production in different spheres of society economy, education, the humanities and the social sciences.
For an analysis of knowledge cultures in the sciences and high-technology see Knorr-Cetina , and in general Rammert Above all warnings are also concerning the enthusiasm which seems to drive Gibbons and others in view of Mode 2; cf. An organization like Greenpeace is a good example illustrating the observation that an increase in institutionalization and recognition usually is coupled with a professionalization and scientification of also the non-professional or counterexpertise For the institutionalization of social movements in general cf.
Rucht, Blattert and Rink, In postmodern discourse it is claimed that the dividing line between insiders and outsiders, insider and outsider knowledge becomes blurred; we do not share this approach. In accordance with the perspective of the sociology of knowledge we maintain the distinction between expert and lay knowledge, though not the clear-cut distinction between the professional expert and the layman.
As mentioned above, we place a fourth figure besides layman, well-informed citizen and professional, namely the active participant with her or his input of new relevances, fulfilling the function of a critical corrective against the side-effects of the modernization process. Thus the production of expert knowledge develops as an independent subject matter to be studied in future research on different groups of experts. We are not going into the question raised by Knorr-Cetina as to whether this logically implies a departure from traditional definitions of knowledge.
In contrast to the model of negotiation discussed here cf. Giddens distinguishes a discursive consciousness from a practical consciousness. The first can be outlined by a person when asked to do so since it is explicitly represented in the stock of knowledge; the second can only be reconstructed from the implicit stock of knowledge. Bogner and Menz b, pp.
Interpretive knowledge is created not only in functional contexts but is additionally shaped by subjective relevances and viewpoints. The aforementioned embeddedness of expert knowledge in the biographical sphere and in the life-world is bearing effect here. Against the background of a tradition of ethnographic research, Pfadenhauer , p. Experts and Changes in Knowledge Production The interview was carried out for a study of implementation of equal treatment policy in public administration Meuser, A detailed presentation of the analytical steps can be found in Meuser and Nagel , reprinted in Bogner, Littig and Menz, Further readings Miller, R.
Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty Oxford: Towards a New Modernity London: Verlag Barbara Budrich , pp. Theorie, Methode, Anwendung Opladen: Leske and Budrich , pp. Studies in Social Interaction New York: The Free Press , pp. Outline of the Theory of Structuration Cambridge: Strategy, Techniques, and Tactics Homewood: Die institutionalisierte Kompetenz zur Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit Opladen: Grundlegung eines Forschungsprogramms Wiesbaden: Ein Vergleich naturwissenschaftlicher Wissensformen Frankfurt am Main: Nagel Matthes- , U.
Deutscher Volkshochschulverband , pp. Eine wissenssoziologische Rekonstruktion institutionalisierter Kompetenzdarstellungskompetenz Opladen: Narr Verlag , pp.
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Experteninterviews in der Arbeitsmarktforschung. The use of particular methods sometimes precedes their general theoretical reflection. For many years, the widely held view was that expert interviews were conducted frequently but only rarely thought through Meuser and Nagel, Only in recent years has the debate about expert interviews gradually become more concrete see Bogner and Menz, However, this has certainly not led to a situation in which the different definitions and methodological conceptions of expert interviews have moved closer together.
Even today there are disputes not only about how expert interviews can be placed on a secure methodological footing, but also about whether this is even possible in principle. Different positions continue to be opposed to one another. Meuser and Nagel , , , for example, have advocated a form of expert interview that is genuinely situated in the qualitative paradigm.
They argue that the long period in which methodological reflection was not well developed can be explained by the lack of recognition accorded to the specific strengths of this kind of interview, and by the persistence of a research tradition in which the expert interview is usually seen as having no more than an exploratory function.
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It is argued that the attempt to turn the expert interview into a particular 43 44 Alexander Bogner and Wolfgang Menz method overlooks the contextual nature of research. This leads to a relativity in this form of interview which places three kinds of obstacle in the way of any attempted methodological generalization.
Firstly, all research relies on a relational concept of the expert, which depends on the topic being investigated Deeke, , p. Secondly, conversations with experts constitute a particular social situation that is especially susceptible to interferences; this may not invalidate the basic principles of how interviews should be conducted, but it sets narrow limits to the range of prescriptive methodological rules available Vogel, , p. Thirdly and finally, it is argued that one cannot stipulate that expert interviews should be carried out in a certain way. Interviewers will always have their own particular interest in the subject under investigation, and their own concrete question to which they are seeking an answer; this inevitably leads to flexibility in the use of this instrument of enquiry see Trinczek, in this volume.
This seems to mean that a proliferation of ways of proceeding is unavoidable in the area of expert interviews. And this gives us very few grounds for optimism that this form of interview could ever take on firm, distinctive contours. In addition, expert consultations are not restricted to qualitative interviews, and neither can they be considered typical representatives of the qualitative paradigm when they are carried out as semi-structured interviews.
The expert interview is thus seen as a methodological hybrid which, notwithstanding numerous indications that inter-paradigm debates are rapidly becoming less relevant to the practice of research see Kelle and Erzberger, , has clear weaknesses because it belongs to both worlds. This may all sound rather dramatic. In fact, though, the controversy about the methodology of the expert interview is not, in our view, caused by fundamental methodological difficulties.
We suspect that the problem lies elsewhere, and that the debate about the expert interview is being kept alive by a lack of clarity in the systematization of the different epistemological interests and research designs. In this article, we proceed in the first section by identifying three dominant forms of expert interview.
This is designed to make clear the specific The Theory-Generating Expert Interview 45 status of, and claims made on behalf of, the expert interview, aspects which are frequently only dealt with implicitly in the debate about methodology. In accordance with this methodological situation of the issue, we do not treat the object of investigation as a social fact, and we do not treat knowledge about it as the result of an objective comprehension or passive reception of the facts of the situation.
Instead, our research attitude is a perspective from the sociology of knowledge, which understands social reality as a construction created by acts of interpretation Berger and Luckmann, Basic social constructivist assumptions like these see Knorr-Cetina, , Flick, are central points of reference for the discussion which follows about the nature and knowledge of experts and about suitable interaction strategies for use in interviews. In the second section, we begin by proposing an analytic differentiation between forms of expert knowledge in the framework of the discussion about different approaches to the concept of the expert.
Only an explicit concept of expert knowledge as an act of construction performed by the researcher is capable of paving the way for a fundamental change of perspective with regard to the interpretation and conceptualization of the interaction situation. We then outline a concept of the expert, which takes into account the power and the social effects of expert knowledge. This concept owes much to critiques of the theoretical absolutization of the interactionist production of meanings and rules, such as can be found in the work of Blumer and others.
Our own proposal is based on an assessment that the status of experts is not just produced by subjective-situative processes of interpretation, but has its pre-existence confirmed to an equal degree by these processes. This enables us to incorporate into our analysis systematic asymmetries and inequalities that are not limited to local interaction structures and on which expert status essentially rests.
In concrete terms, we argue that what is known as interaction effects should be treated not as variables that distort the situation, but as elements, which are constitutive of the process of data production. It is evident that this criticism rests on a competing concept of the expert interview, but this concept is not made explicit in any systematic way.
The following discussion therefore proposes a differentiation of the dominant forms of expert interview employed in the methodological debate, in accordance with their epistemological functions. Following suggestions made by Vogel and with the help of ideas from the relevant works by Meuser and Nagel, we distinguish between exploratory, systematizing, and theory-generating expert interviews.
In both quantitatively and qualitatively oriented research projects, expert interviews can serve to establish an initial orientation in a field that is either substantively new or poorly defined, as a way of helping the researcher to develop a clearer idea of the problem or as a preliminary move in the identification of a final interview guide.
In this sense, exploratory interviews help to structure the area under investigation and to generate hypotheses. The experts interviewed may themselves belong to the target group of the study as part of the field of action, but in many cases experts are also deliberately used as a complementary source of information about the target group that is the actual subject. In this respect the exploratory expert interview differs from the narrative or episodic interview, though this does not mean that any spontaneous digressions or unexpected changes of subject on the part of the expert should be nipped in the bud.
The focus of the exploratory interview, in terms of its subject matter, is on sounding out the subject under investigation. The objective is not to compare data, acquire as much information as possible, or standardize the data. There is thus a fundamental distinction between the exploratory interview and the other two types. The focus here is on knowledge of action and experience, The Theory-Generating Expert Interview 47 which has been derived from practice, is reflexively accessible, and can be spontaneously communicated. This kind of expert interview is an attempt to obtain systematic and complete information.
This means that the expert is treated here primarily as a guide who possesses certain valid pieces of knowledge and information, as someone with a specific kind of specialized knowledge that is not available to the researcher.
With the help of a fairly elaborate topic guide, the researcher gains access to this knowledge. It is true that this type does not restrict the concept of the expert to the person who is in possession of particular, specialized knowledge of exceptional quality. This approach also treats knowledge derived from practical everyday experience as a possible object of expert interviews.
The main focus, though, is not on the interpretative character of expert knowledge but rather on its capacity to provide researchers with facts concerning the question they are investigating. Experts are a source of information with regard to the reconstruction of sequences of events and social situations: From this methodological perspective it is not the experts themselves who are the object of the investigation; their function is rather that of informants who provide information about the real objects being investigated.
Even so, systematizing interviews are not necessarily open and qualitative. Standardized surveys — such as those used in, for example, the Delphi method see Aichholzer, — are also possible here. The final point to make in this connection is that in the case of systematizing expert interviews, unlike exploratory interviews, it is important for the data to be comparable in relation to the subject matter. One significant aspect of the systematizing expert interview is the way it has become an important tool for the collection of data in the framework of multi-method approaches triangulation , for example in organizational sociology.
We suspect that the dominance of this form of pure enquiry about information has contributed to the restricted understanding of conversations with experts which leads to the perception of the systematizing type as pars pro toto.
Interviewing Experts (Research Methods)
It may also be a paradoxical consequence of the popularity of the systematizing expert interview that the connection between empirical practice and methodological reflection is so weak in the case of the expert interview. In this case the expert no longer serves 48 Alexander Bogner and Wolfgang Menz as the catalyst of the research process, or to put it another way as the means by which the researcher can obtain useful information and elucidation of the issue being investigated. The essence of the theory-generating interview is that its goal is the communicative opening up and analytic reconstruction of the subjective dimension of expert knowledge.
Here, subjective action orientations and implicit decision making maxims of experts from a particular specialist field are the starting-point of the formulation of theory. In ideal terms, this procedure seeks to generate theory via the interpretative generalization of a typology — by contrast with the representative statistical conclusions that result from standardized procedures. It follows that the theory-generating expert interview must be classified as part of the methodological canon oriented to the fundamental principles of interpretative sociology.
This means that we have settled the paradigmatic fate of the theorygenerating interview. However, we still have to answer the question of whether this kind of expert interview involves a specific method that can be clearly distinguished from those used in paradigmatically related forms of interview. The following discussion of the concept of the expert is a response to this objection.
A method-oriented reformulation of the concept of the expert 2. These approaches rely on different analytic and normative perspectives, and in the discussion that follows we identify them as the voluntaristic, the constructivist, and the sociology of knowledge concepts of the expert. However, because of the convergence between the constructivist and the sociology of knowledge approaches, it comes as no surprise that what we encounter in practice is usually a mixture of different conceptualizations oriented towards specific research interests.
We argue that a definition which insists The Theory-Generating Expert Interview 49 exclusively on the knowledge dimension of expertise leads to weaknesses in relation to method and to contradictions, and in the conclusion to this section we outline a concept of the expert which makes use of ideas from modernization theory concerning changes in the figure of the expert.
This would mean that in principle, everyone is an expert — an expert on their own life, or as Mayring , p. Considerations related to analytic differentiation also mean that it is hard to see why we should extend the concept of the expert in this way. In addition, if every individual is by definition an expert, it becomes difficult to interpret situations in which expert knowledge clearly has specific social effects. Of course, it does not seem appropriate to treat the difference between laypersons and experts as an absolute difference this strict demarcation is increasingly being called into question, especially in recent work on the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of science — see Meuser and Nagel, in this volume , but it is no more productive to adopt a voluntaristic approach which sees itself subjectively as emancipatory and critical of authority, but which finally does no more than attempt to flatten out existing hierarchies by means of an effort of conceptual will.
In conducting an investigation, the researcher assumes that the selected expert is in possession of relevant knowledge about a certain subject Meuser and Nagel, , Deeke, The consequence of this approach for the practice of research is that one can also look successfully for experts at lower levels of hierarchy within organizations see Froschauer and Lueger, in this volume. It is not always the case and one could even say that it is rarely the case that leading figures who are the public face of an organization are also the experts a researcher is 50 Alexander Bogner and Wolfgang Menz looking for.
In theoretical terms, the method-relational definition reminds us that expertise is not a personal quality or capacity. As a rule, researchers fall back on those who have established their reputation by publishing in the relevant literature, who are active in the corresponding associations and organizations, and who have attained prestigious qualifications and occupy prestigious positions.
These social ingredients indicate that the relational approach and the social-representational approach are closely related. The latter approach states that an expert is anyone who is made into an expert by societal processes, that is who is seen as an expert in social reality.
The method-relational and social-representational approaches are so closely interconnected with one another that any distinction between them is of primarily analytic value. In research practice, who is to count as an expert and who is sought after as an expert is always defined via specific research interests and simultaneously through the social representativity of the expert.
The limits of the constructivist position become clear when one considers that researchers selecting an expert are always practically guided by the form in which they find the social world, the meanings that have been structured into that world before researchers engage with it. One reason for this is to be found in the paradigmatic orientation of the scholars who have set out the idea of the theory-generating interview as a special form of the qualitative interview.
A second reason is the fact that the debate within sociology about the figure and function of the expert was at a fairly early stage initiated by sociologists of knowledge, and it has been largely dominated by these scholars. This certainly does not mean, however, that any consistent concept of the expert has been employed. What unites those who have been engaged in this debate is the way they conceptualize experts in terms of the specific structure of their knowledge.
As the well-informed citizen weighs up, in a rational way, the arguments put forward by different experts involved in a dispute, we can observe a new way of dealing with knowledge and science in which the first cracks appear in the notion of the expert as an objective and neutral guardian of the truth. In the following discussion, both the sociology of science-related aspects of this question and its implicit relevance to politics, and the theory of democracy were taken up. This special knowledge is unlike general knowledge in that it includes complex, integrated stores of knowledge and is also related constitutively to the pursuit of a profession.
Criticism has been voiced of the narrowing of the concept of the expert so as to restrict it to professional activity, in view of the fact that experts participate in extra-parliamentary social movements on a voluntary basis Meuser and Nagel, Critics have also objected to the idea that what distinguishes expert knowledge is its reflexivity and explicitness. Meuser and Nagel , p. In terms of theory, it means that the definition of an expert which argues via a differentiation of forms of knowledge needs to be expanded, though not fundamentally corrected.
Introducing the idea of a special structure or form of knowledge that is available to the expert is neither theoretically satisfactory nor productive in terms of method. The first problem here is that an expert who is conceptualized as possessing a specific additional store of knowledge seems to have been detached from the societal conditions of recognition of his or her expert status. Because this recognition depends on social parameters which can themselves change, we would argue that it is not in the first instance 52 Alexander Bogner and Wolfgang Menz actually existing differences in competence that characterize the sought after expert, but rather the social relevance of his or her knowledge.
We shall return to this point later. It therefore seems to be appropriate to proceed via an analytic differentiation of expert knowledge in order to solve these problems of method. If, on the other hand, we proceed via a process of analytical differentiation that cuts across the traditional distinction between everyday and expert knowledge, we can identify three central dimensions of expert knowledge, which also converge with the different method-related and theoretical claims made by the expert interview: As we reconstruct this interpretative knowledge we enter, to put it in old-fashioned terms, the sphere of ideas and ideologies, of fragmentary, inconsistent configurations of meaning and patterns of explanation.
This is of interest for a social-scientific investigation not because the expert is, for example, able to demonstrate access to this knowledge in an especially systematic or reflexive way or because it provides a particularly accurate reflection of reality, but because it affects practice to a significant degree. In theory-generating expert interviews, we consult experts because their action orientations, knowledge and assessments decisively structure, or help to structure, the conditions of action of other actors, thereby showing that expert knowledge has a socially relevant dimension.
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It is not the exclusive nature of his or her knowledge that makes an expert interesting for the purposes of an interview oriented towards interpretative knowledge, but the fact that this knowledge has the power to produce practical effects. As Beck has shown in his analysis of the radical transformation in the meanings of knowledge and science in conditions where the concepts of nature and society can hardly be kept apart, what constitutes a post-traditional expert is that she or he is, by virtue of his or her specific knowledge, politically influential.
Experts can thus be understood as people who, on the basis of specific knowledge that is derived from practice or experience and which relates to a clearly demarcated range of problems, have created a situation where it is possible for their interpretations to structure the concrete field of action in a way that is meaningful and guides action.
This means that the question of who is to count as an expert for purposes of method always has to be answered in relation to the concrete field of operation in which the expert acts, and with reference to the investigative spectrum of the empirical study being carried out. We are now in a position to offer the following approximate methodological definition of the concept of the expert. In this respect, expert knowledge consists not only of systematized, reflexively accessible knowledge relating to a specialized subject or field, but also has to a considerable extent the character of practical or action knowledge, which incorporates a range of quite disparate maxims for action, individual The Theory-Generating Expert Interview 55 rules of decision, collective orientations and patterns of social interpretation.
In other words, the possibility exists that the expert may be able to get his or her orientations enforced at least in part. This definition emphasizes that the goal of the theory-generating expert interview is the reconstruction and analysis of a specific configuration of knowledge. This means that in terms of method, it cannot be treated as nothing more than a qualitative interview with a particular social group. The need for a methodologically adequate concept of the expert is closely connected with the problem of the concrete selection of people to be consulted in the empirical investigation.
The broader definition of the expert does not just leave us with the problem of localizing the specific knowledge that is relevant to our investigation. Since we often have little idea in advance either of the distribution of relevant knowledge or of the power structures within the field of investigation, the selection of people to be consulted must inevitably be an iterative process.
After we have carried out the first round of interviews, we will have further information that may help us in selecting our next group of interviewees.