Goals

After reading this article, you will be able to do the following:

1. Describe the importance of the language and terms that your informant uses while you conduct an ethnographic interview.
2. Identify various contrast questions to use during your ethnographic interview.
3. Classify your contrast questions and their appropriateness during the various stages of an ethnographic interview.
4. Compose and adapt contrast questions that privilege your informant’s knowledge and native language and adapt them to your interview.

Language and Culture

One of your goals in conducting an ethnographic interview is to understand your informant’s perspective through their own culture’s language. An informant in ethnography is anyone you are interviewing to learn more about their culture. For example, if you are interviewing someone about fishing, you want to hear their ideas in the language that fishers naturally use. If you are interviewing someone about poetry, you want to hear those ideas in the language that poets use. Not only does this help us understand their culture by preserving meaning, but it also prevents the confusion that occurs when one language is translated to another. And, your informant’s language provides even more opportunities to learn about their culture (Spradley, 2016).

Note that when we say language here, we’re referring to the terms and meanings used in a unique culture—such as fishing or poetry—even if those terms are said in English or Spanish or French, etc. Although informants who are fishers, gamers, poets, and chefs might all speak English, they use specific terms that are unique to their particular cultures and that mean something special to other people in those cultures—in ways that outsiders might not understand. They are speaking their own language when they use those terms. As an ethnographic interviewer, you must learn an informant’s own terms and understand what they mean as clearly as possible to understand their culture more thoroughly. After all, understanding a person’s cultural language is deeply interrelated with understanding the people (Lowie, 1940).

Contrast Questions

One strategy for understanding an informant’s terms that are particular to a certain culture, such as fishing or poetry, is to ask contrast questions. Contrast questions help make sense of an informant’s terms by comparing and contrasting those terms with each other. As you might have guessed, it’s particularly important how the term you’re trying to understand is different from other terms—how it contrasts with those other terms.

Contrast questions are useful for making sense of terms because all words are part of a system—a big structure of many words that all work together as a language. In fact, the way words form part of a larger system is key to the way human beings make sense of any language (Saussure, 1959). To illustrate this point, imagine for a moment a shining red light. What would you say if I asked you what the red light meant? Your answer would depend on what larger system the light is a part of. If it’s part of a stoplight, which also has a green light and a yellow light, you would know the red light means stop. But as a part of other systems, the red light would have different meanings. On a computer motherboard, a red light might mean a hardware error. On an airplane wing, a red light means you’re looking at the left side of the airplane—the other side’s wing has a green light. We can only get at a symbol’s meaning if we learn about the whole system (Solomon and Maasik, 2017). Similarly, learning about your informant’s language requires that you understand a term’s relationship to a larger system and the contrasts within that system.

Take a look at the following example. Sarah interviews Cole, the informant, about his experience as a student in a college composition class. College is a culture that he is a part of and that Sarah wants to know more about. As you read, think about the questions that Sarah is asking and what information she hopes to get from Cole as he answers her questions.

A key that relationship terms have with each other is a contrast relationship—how is each term distinct and different from others in the same category? For example, what makes one boat a ship and another boat a carrier or a tugboat? Even though these all belong to the boat category, learning about the differences between them is going to lead to insights about them and about boats in general. This is why contrast questions, which reveal the similarities and differences between terms, are so important.

Contrast-Question Types

There are several contrast-question types and activities that you can use as tools to make sense of terms and their meanings. These are the contrast questions and activities:

• contrast-verification questions.
• directed-contrast questions.
• dyadic- and triadic-contrast questions.
• contrast set-sorting questions activity.
• twenty-questions game.
• rating-questions activity.

Contrast-Verification Question

The contrast-verification question is great to use when you believe that you have discovered a difference between two terms. To verify the difference between two terms, ask your informant if you have understood that difference correctly. For example, imagine that Cole told Sarah about the different assignments that he must write for his composition class, including reading journals and essay drafts. Sarah noticed that for some assignments, Cole mentioned having to complete peer reviews with classmates, but not for others. To make sure she understands correctly, Sarah might ask a contrast-verification question to verify the information by saying something like this:

Through Sarah’s questions, more differences emerge: some assignments need an outline, some need a proposal approved by the instructor, etc. When you have a good idea of how your informant is using terms that are similar or different, it’s a good idea to verify—to make sure with a contrast-verification question.

Directed-Contrast Question

A second contrast-question type that you can use to make sense of terms and their meaning is the directed-contrast question. Let’s say that in a specific category, you know a particular quality that makes one term different from others, such as how essay drafts are similar to other composition assignments, but how they need peer review. You can use this knowledge to ask your informant what other terms share that quality. For example, you might ask, “Which other composition assignments also require a peer review?” Through a directed-contrast question, you learn about all the category’s terms that share a key difference.

Dyadic- and Triadic–Contrast Question

But what if you don’t already know the differences that set certain category terms apart from the others? In that case, a dyadic contrast question is a terrific way to start finding out those differences. In this question type, pick out two terms or ideas and simply ask your informant to tell you about the differences. For example, Sarah might ask Cole something like this:

You can also use triadic-contrast questions by adding a third term to the mix when you ask your informant to describe the differences—this gives them an opportunity to talk about even more term contrasts.

Activity Questions

Additionally, there are activity-type questions that you can use to figure out term contrasts that your informant uses. Good questions get at a term’s meaning and how terms are related. Adding relevant activities keeps your informant interested in the interview—and leads to discovering even more contrasts.

Contrast Set-Sorting Questions Activity

One question-type activity that you can try is the contrast set-sorting questions activity. In this activity, you first write down on flash cards or index cards the terms that your informant has used that you’re interested in learning more about. Next, give your informant the flashcards and ask them to sort the cards into stacks according to how they are alike or different. Once your informant has sorted the cards, ask a question like this:

After you learn about how the terms contrast, ask your informant to sort the cards again in a different way that they think is important. Repeat the activity as many times as it is useful.

That’s it! This technique’s beauty is that you aren’t leading your informant to give you particular information or inserting your own ideas. Instead, you let the informant decide the important ways to sort and organize the terms, which is going to lead to more information for you about how your informant and their culture view these terms. In fact, informants are likely to ask you how you want them to sort the terms—what methods or criteria to use—but the best way to respond is that you want them to sort the cards any way they think is important. You’re not testing them for the information you want. Instead, you want to hear what they think and to learn from them. Therefore, you’re learning what cultural ideas, relationships, and contrasts your informant thinks are meaningful.

Twenty-Questions Game

Another kind of activity you can use is the Twenty-Questions Game. You might have played this game when you were a kid. Game rules are as follows: one person thinks of a thing, and someone else tries to guess what the first person is thinking by only asking yes-or-no questions. The thing the first player thinks of can be anything—a person, an animal, an object, etc. The challenge is for the guesser to guess correctly after asking just twenty yes-or-no questions.

You can modify this game a bit to make it useful within ethnographic interviews. To prepare, pick a term that you know belongs to a certain category, which we can also call a domain. (The “Structural Questions” article has more information on domains). After picking your domain or category, tell your informant that you’re thinking of a term that belongs to that category, and ask them to try to guess which term you’re thinking of by only asking you yes-or-no questions. This game gives you a great opportunity to learn about the similarities and differences that the term has with other terms in the same category. Your informant’s questions can even reveal contrasts that neither of you would have thought of otherwise.

Look at the following conversation. For example, informant Deb, who is part of the local car culture, tries to guess which car her ethnographic interviewer, Amar, is thinking of from a list of popular cars at local car meets.

As you can see, Amar used Deb’s questions as a guide to ask and learn more about the contrasts between these items—cars.

Rating-Questions Activity

Finally, the last activity type that you can use contrast questions with is called the rating-questions activity. For this activity, you ask your informant to rate or rank various terms within a specific category, such as which ones they think are the best, worst, hardest, easiest, and so on. For example, regarding Sarah’s interview with Cole about being a college student, once she knows that certain assignments belong in the essays category, she might ask these questions:

Conclusion

All these questions help you understand an informant’s culture better by helping you understand the relationships between terms, by helping you understand the ways people within the informant’s insider culture use those terms, and by helping you understand how those terms are similar or different.

Practice

Imagine that you are doing a follow-up interview with Deb about the different cars at the local car meet. Which contrast-type questions are most useful for you to ask to find out the difference between the terms you heard Deb using, such as plug-in hybrid car, fully electric car, and gas-powered car? Create a few category or domain contrast questions to use in the interview. Which activity do you think is most helpful to learn more about these terms?

Now, consider the following questions:

• Think of a hobby or interest of yours for which you learned particular terms that outsiders don’t know. Think about how to explain these terms to others. Would they have to know multiple terms to understand their meaning clearly?
• What terms or information might you miss if your informant translates their terms into simpler language that everyone already knows?
• The contrast-question type that you ask often depends on what you already know about the informant’s terms—and what you don’t know. Would some contrast-question types work better early in an interview? Later in an interview?

References

Lowie, R. (1940). Native languages as ethnographic tools. American Anthropologist, 42(1), 81-89.

Maasik, S., & Solomon, J. (2018). Signs of life in the USA: Readings on popular culture for writers. Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Spradley, J. P. (2016). The ethnographic interview. Holt Rinehart & Winston.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1959). Course in general linguistics. McGraw-Hill Book Company.