No. 12 - Juliane Klein, Uwe Schimank & Michael Walter: How to conduct interviews on media repertoires as routine practices – problems and empirical experiences

Against the backdrop of a changing media environment, the practices individuals apply on a daily basis and in different life spheres have altered dramatically. Small investors, for instance, increasingly rely on the internet to follow financial market trends online or to gather information on the background of companies before investing in their stocks. However, it is an open question whether or not the individual is conscious or rather unaware of these changed practices since the use of different media might be inherent to their daily routine. This potential lack of awareness makes it difficult to research the role
these Transforming Communications play in the individual’s conduct of life. Therefore, the purpose of this methodical chapter is to identify an interviewing strategy for cross-media
studies that meet the requirement of openness so as to ensure the respondents’ freedom to set their own relevance structures, while at the same time maintaining the thematic focus on the interviewees’ media repertoire.

Openness is the main principle that distinguishes qualitative social research from the
quantitative approach. While in quantitative empirical research the investigator sets the relevance structures with the help of pre-formulated categories, the aim of qualitative empirical research is to avoid imposing a structure, but to reconstruct actors’ subjective relevance through the principle of openness (e.g. Przyborski/Wohlrab-Sahr 2009; 140). In the same vein, we aim to reconstruct the relevance individuals attach to their media repertoires and to media change in their conduct of life with respect to disturbances and coping.

About the authors

Juliane Klein
Juliane Klein works as research associate in the project “Irritations-coping nexus of middle class life” of the Creative Unit “Communicative Figurations” at the University of Bremen. She has completed her Ph.D. in Sociology and specialising in field B: Welfare State, Inequality and Quality of Life at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) at the University of Bremen. Her dissertation project has the working title “Transferring Professional Skills: Institutional Strategies and Individual Experiences in the Case of Central and Eastern European Migrant Physicians in German Hospitals”.

Uwe Schimank
Uwe Schimank is full professor of sociological theory at the Research Centre on Inequality and Social Policy of the University of Bremen. His research interests include theory of society and social theory, organizational sociology, economic sociology, science and higher education studies. Before coming to Bremen, he was full professor of sociology at the FernUniversität in Hagen. He leads the research project “Irritations-coping nexus of middle class life” of the Creative Unit “Communicative Figurations” at the University of Bremen.

Michael Walter
Michael Walter works as a postdoctoral research associate at the Research Centre on Inequality and Social Policy of the University of Bremen. Prior to his current position, he was research associate in the project “Irritations-coping nexus of middle class life” of the Creative Unit “Communicative Figurations” at the University of Bremen. Previously, he worked as a research associate in the DFG research project „Migration and humour. Social functions and conversational potential of humour and satire in the inter-/intra-ethnic relationships in Germany” at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen. He studied sociology and modern German literature at the University of Konstanz and completed his dissertation in 2014 on “Image politics of oeconomical reform initiatives in Germany”.