Friday, 22 May 2015

Interviewing for Education and Social Science Research: The Gateway Approach,
Carolyn Lunsford Mears, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009, page 15

Based on the idea that verbal evidence - as opposed to physical artifacts - always offers not fact but the interpretation of fact by the narrator, Mears comments:

Interviews collect more than details about an event ... they offer access to that place where interpreted human experience and response intersect with an educational, social, cultral, spiritual or political dynamic, providing the means by whih privately held contents of memory can be communicated to a lisening researcher.

She reports that psychologists recognise that memory does to reproduce the past literally, and adds:

Once experiences are reflected upon and told in an interview, the human dimension of an event of experience begins to take shape.

Here is one of the keys for my research: discovering how JBYs respond to the reception they receive in church.