“Dealing with” Interview Data and Metatheory in Educational Research:

Between the “wisdom of ignorance” and “prescribed wisdom”

Abstract

This paper concerns the way educational sociologists “deal with” interview data recorded during fieldwork. In my recent research on the educational activities of fukushi kyoin (welfare teachers) in Kochi prefecture, which focused on “historical” events from the early post-war era to the 1960s, I recorded a great deal of interview data in the field, but was very reluctant to deal with the interview data as a constructionist life story researcher like myself would do before committing myself to the final research project. The constructionist presupposition that any reality is constructed through discursive practice prohibits us from interpreting interview narrative with reference to “outer world” reality and forces us to deal with the narrative exclusively. In my case with the fukushi kyoin, however, I decided to “utilize” the interview data in combination with other kinds of data-like documents. This means that I placed greater distance between myself and the interview data compared with the case of pure life story research.

Here I point out that in educational research it is often hard to maintain the constructionist presupposition because education as an occupational world has, compared with other kinds of occupations, a highly intimate relationship with the written world and this reduces the interviewerʼs tension to the narrative itself. In addition, the fact that it is easier, through cooperation between the interviewer and interviewee, to construct and confirm that both share a common background, namely “education,” causes the withdrawal of the metatheory that life story researchers support: the “wisdom of ignorance.” Instead, in educational research the dominant metatheory is “prescribed wisdom,” presupposing the superiority and precedence of the interviewer and interpreter to the interviewee and those researched.

However it is also important that the practice of “re-use” of interview data may provide us with the opportunity to be conscious of the above-mentioned dominant metatheory in educational sociology. This may lead us to a radical criticism of the self-evident “prescribed wisdom” in any educational research.