Communicative Strategies of Interviewers in Sociological Research: Linguistic Politeness and Question Form

The following study deals with to the analysis of sociological research interviews as conversational data. On the secondary data, provided by HSE’s labs (Laboratory of Sociology in Education and Science, Centre for Youth Studies) we performed coding to find out the communicative strategies of interviewers, which we mainly analyzed in two domains: politeness strategies (Brown & Levinson, 1987) and question forms. These findings were analyzed in association with methodological advices that are given by various study materials including ones that are used during the preparation of specialists on the programme Sociology and Social Informatics in HSE. We identified the important aspects of research interviews, such as topic switch, question types, researcher’s empathy and remarks. Analyzing 32 interviews we found how they are realized in terms of politeness strategies. Researchers appeared to be using many types of questions, some of them, such as baiting questions are more productive than basic questions. Topic change is realized with multiple negative politeness strategies. Closer to the end of the interview positive politeness strategies such as empathy, remarks and mentioning personal experience appear. Interviews about practices and about beliefs turned out to be quite different in terms of politeness strategies applied: in the latter positive politeness strategies are more common, apart from that, negative politeness strategy such as epistemological distancing, which was not present in interviews about practices is used. The results show how sociological research interviews are performed on practice and can give insights on how the methodology of interviews can be improved.