Catherine Trundle, John Gardner and Tarryn Phillips are collaborating on a project building resources that clarify the techniques of ethnographic interviewing.

Our article The Ethnographic Interview:  An interdisciplinary guide for developing an ethnographic disposition in health research forthcoming (2024) in the journal Qualitative Health Research offers two interventions.

We provide concrete guidance for ethnographic interviewing. We outline seven key dispositions that underpin the ethnographic interview. These are: humility; a readiness to revise core assumptions about a research topic; attentiveness to context; relationality; openness to complexity; an attention to ethnographic writing; and a consideration of the politics and history of the method. The strength of an epistemic understanding of the ethnographic interview is that it offers flexibility for developing a diverse array of interview techniques responsive to the needs of different research contexts and challenges.

We also decouple ethnographic interviews from the necessity of accompanying participant observation, making an argument that interview-only research can still be richly ethnographic.

“Our definition of ethnography purposefully does not center immersive research in social settings and extended observation of social relations, as is commonly centered within many methodological definitions of ethnography. Our definition thus invites interview-based health ethnographers away from the periphery of ethnographic method, and firmly into its center.”