Abstract
This study seeks to bring a more interactionally grounded perspective to the concept of “rapport” and its relevance for qualitative interviewing practices. Building on work within conversation analysis (CA), it respecifies rapport as affiliation and, more specifically, empathy. Analysis centers on case study data from an interview with an asylum seeker from the Philippines. It examines how interviewer and interviewee move in and out of empathic moments across the interview sequences as they manage their affective stances related to the events the interviewee describes and, in turn, by managing their empathic alignments with each other. These empathic moments share a number of features: they primarily come after response delays and the interviewee’s response pursuits, they are part of assessment sequences built by lexical reformulation and repetition, they entail stance matching and upgrading mainly through the use of prosodic resources, and they involve the interviewee asserting his primary rights to characterize and assess his own experiences. The article concludes by recommending more attention to the affiliative and empathic dimensions of qualitative interviewing.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The social life of methods: Introducing the special issue
- Accomplishing “rapport” in qualitative research interviews: Empathic moments in interaction
- Interaction in qualitative questionnaires: From self-report to intersubjective achievement
- Actively managed products: Think-aloud data and methods in applied linguistics research
- Focus group interaction in evaluation research
- Transforming instruction to activity: Roleplay in language assessment
- Achieving epistemic alignment in a psycholinguistic experiment
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The social life of methods: Introducing the special issue
- Accomplishing “rapport” in qualitative research interviews: Empathic moments in interaction
- Interaction in qualitative questionnaires: From self-report to intersubjective achievement
- Actively managed products: Think-aloud data and methods in applied linguistics research
- Focus group interaction in evaluation research
- Transforming instruction to activity: Roleplay in language assessment
- Achieving epistemic alignment in a psycholinguistic experiment