Goals

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

1. Explain what practices help you to establish and assess interview rapport with your informant.
2. Identify various descriptive questions to use during your ethnographic interview.
3. Classify your descriptive questions and their appropriateness during the various stages of an ethnographic interview.
4. Create and modify descriptive questions that privilege your informant’s knowledge and native language.

Using Descriptive Questions to Establish Rapport

Some initial question types that you’ll want to know about to conduct a successful ethnographic interview are descriptive questions. In some ways, descriptive questions are as simple as they sound—you want the person you’re interviewing, known as your informant, to describe something for you. Likely, you would already ask descriptive questions as part of your interview. However, there are a few principles and tips to keep in mind that will help you get the best result possible from your descriptive questions. Knowing more about these questions and when they’re most useful will help you most effectively deploy them from your toolbox.

There are also some things you’ll want to think about before you start planning what questions to ask. Keep in mind that it takes time and shared experiences to build rapport with your informants. Building rapport means that you and your informant establish a positive relationship with good communication and that both of you are comfortable sharing information (Spradley, 2016). In an effective interview, you and your informant act as talking partners responding to each other, building on what you each say, and adapting to each other’s conversation (Rapport, 2020).

It’s normal for a new informant to feel nervous, unsure, or even guarded about being interviewed. Your informant will need time to find out how you interact and how your conversations will go—to explore the interaction—before they are comfortable with the process. There are a few things you can keep in mind during the interview’s early stages to help build good rapport. Descriptive questions are often foundational because they happen early in the interview and help you set up other questions. Keep the following ideas in mind to help you during your overall interview: 1) repeat your explanations, 2) repeat what informants tell you, and 3) focus on the language your informant uses.

Repeating your explanations about the interview and what you want to get out of it will help reassure your informant that they’re doing the right thing and will put them at ease in general about why they’re there. Assure them several times throughout the interview that you want to learn from them, to get to know their viewpoint, and to see things how they see things. Although you know this is ethnography’s core purpose, your informant might not. You never want them to think they’re being tested or that they aren’t useful because their knowledge is ordinary.

When you restate your informant’s most important points, you show them that you’re interested in their answers, and it reinforces what you are learning from them. Finally, if your informant uses unfamiliar terms, ask them directly what they mean. This prevents your informant from feeling they are being tested or doing a bad job. This focus also brings out better understanding because the informant’s native language is so important, as we will talk about soon.

Take a look at the following example where the ethnographic interviewer, Ella, uses these principles while interviewing Ammon about his warehouse work culture.

Through these strategies, you and your informant start to work together to discover, explain, and create knowledge (Khanal, 2016). This brings us to the descriptive questions, which are a great way to kick off the interview. There are different descriptive-question types that you can use. As the ethnographic interviewer, you choose which types work best during your interview. As you get to know your informant and begin to learn more about their ideas, it will become clearer when you want to ask a certain question type. When in doubt, it is helpful to remember that your purpose in asking ethnographic questions is to get your informant’s ideas about their culture in their own words and according to their own viewpoint.

Descriptive-Question Types

There are various descriptive-question types that we will talk about—they include the following: grand-tour questions, mini-tour questions, example questions, experience questions, native-language questions, direct-language questions, hypothetical-interaction questions, and typical-sentence questions. All these questions help you to understand broadly how your informants view the world (Westby et al, 2003).

Grand-Tour Questions

Grand-tour questions are especially useful near the ethnographic interview’s beginning. A grand-tour question is one where you ask your informant to give you a mental tour of a place that’s important to them and the culture you’re studying. For example, if you want to learn about the college your informant goes to, you might ask, “Can you describe the campus quad for me?” And if you are interviewing someone about their experience working in a warehouse, ask, “Can you describe the warehouse’s interior?”

Starting with a grand tour is especially useful because it leads you to ask more specific questions about a space’s parts such as, “You mentioned the mathematics building where you’ve taken some of your classes. Can you describe what the building’s inside looks like?” Grand-tour questions can also lead you to ask for a time-period tour. For example, “What are the most important things that happen at your college during the spring semester, from beginning to end?” Your informant could even give you a grand tour of people, objects, or activities: “Can you tell me about each of your professors and describe them?” Or, “What are all the activities you do during your work at the warehouse in an afternoon?”

Also, ask your informant to describe an ordinary day in the location, which will help you to get a general idea of their patterns and routines. Or, ask them to describe a specific time, such as the most recent time they were there, which helps jog your informant’s memory for details.

Sometimes, it’s possible to add an activity to illustrate your grand-tour questions. For example, take an actual walking tour through the college campus together and ask your informant to point out and describe the important places in it and why they’re important. Another activity involves a task that’s meaningful to the informant’s culture, such as going through a college basketball game’s steps and describing each step or walking you through a science project they completed.

Mini-Tour Questions

As I mentioned before, grand-tour questions can lead you to new opportunities to learn about more specific parts of a place, activity, or group of people. Watch out for these opportunities so that you can ask the appropriate mini-tour questions, which are a related descriptive-question type. Mini-tour questions are descriptive questions very similar to grand-tour questions, but they have a smaller and more limited focus. For example, ask your informant about a specific building, like the math building, during a campus grand tour. Then, when it comes to time periods, ask for a more specific mini-tour, such as just finals week or just Greek-life week if your informant mentions that these weeks are important semester events. For routines like what happens at work in the warehouse, if your informant mentions part of the day is spent filling out paperwork, ask, “Could you describe more in-depth what you do when you fill out paperwork?” These mini-tour questions shed light on the grand-tour topic as a whole.

Example Questions

Example questions are a descriptive-question type that helps you learn more deeply about a specific place, person, activity—or almost anything else the informant brings up. A great time to use an example question is when you hear your informant mention a term that you think is important to their culture, but you’re not completely sure what the term means. Or, you want to learn more about it. For example, if a college student mentioned that some students seek out blow-off classes, you might ask, “Can you give me an example of a blow-off class?” If your informant, who works in a warehouse, mentions that some days are spent picking, ask for examples of what they do when they are picking.

Experience Questions

Even without a particular term or example to focus on, though, you can ask your informant to think of interesting experiences to share by using an experience question. Ask broadly, “What are some interesting experiences you’ve had in the warehouse?” Or, “Finals week sounds pretty intense. Can you remember some interesting finals week experiences that you’ve had?”

The Culture’s Native Language

One ethnographic interview goal is to learn about the way that people in the culture you’re studying speak to each other—the culture’s native language. This is important whether the culture is college students, warehouse employees—or any other culture, like badminton players, airplane enthusiasts, or anime fans. Instead of giving their answers in a way that already makes the most sense to you, the interviewer—which means they’ve been translated to common language from the native language—we want our informants to share their ideas and experiences in their own culture’s terms.

Native-Language Questions

Therefore, another descriptive-question type to use is native-language questions. These question types involve using your informant’s terminology. Using informant’s native language retains the terms and phrases’ truest meaning because when you translate them, it involves changing them in a way that might remove important context or information. Or, it might involve interpreting the term in a way that is slightly different from the original meaning. Learning more about the informant’s native terms also provides opportunities to learn more about their culture.

For example, depending on what generation or geographic place you’re from, you might have heard that an easy college class is called a gut class or a cram class. Or, you might never have heard these terms at all. If you learn that your informant refers to this class type as a blow-off class, it is helpful for you to use that term as well when framing questions or discussing the topic—and to ask them about it.

Direct-Language Question

There are a few different native-language question types that are useful for finding out more about your informant’s culture depending on your rapport, the interview stage, and what seems most important about the topic. In a direct-language question, just like it sounds, ask your informant directly about the language. For example, ask, “How do you refer to a particularly easy class?” Or, ask directly about how a term is used such as, “So would you say, ‘I’m going to a blow-off class now?’” Your informant might correct your knowledge by saying, “No, I would say, I’m taking a blow-off class this semester.” Even if you have some knowledge about the culture terminology that your informant uses, it’s valuable to ask them what language they use. In fact, it’s even more important in that situation to ask so that you avoid making false assumptions.

Hypothetical-Interaction Question

A hypothetical-interaction question is another native-language question type in which you use an imaginary scenario to help your informant think about how they use their culture’s terminology. For example, ask your informant, “If you were talking to other college students, would you say, ‘I’m in a blow-off class this semester’?” You can also use hypothetical-interaction questions in a broader way to learn more about your informant’s native language terms. You could say, “If I were to sit in your room while you and your roommate choose which classes to register for, what are some things I’d hear you talk about and say?” Imagining those situations, your informant is more likely to use the culture’s native language rather than translating for you.

Typical-Sentence Question

The final native-language question type that you might use is a typical-sentence question. This is similar to a hypothetical-situation question, but you specifically ask your informant for sentences that would include a term about which you’re asking. Ask, “What are some typical sentences where you would use the term blow-off class?” The answers that your informant gives provide you with more context and knowledge about the term’s usage.

Conclusion

Using descriptive questions builds a powerful foundation for ethnographic interviews and are some of the most important questions to include—especially early on. These questions will set you up for success throughout the whole interview process.

Practice

1. Think about a job or career that you’re interested in learning more about. If you were interviewing a professional who does that job, what questions might get you started learning the most about what a workday is like for them?
2. Pick two descriptive-question types that we’ve talked about and create at least one question of each type that you can ask your informant. Here are some example questions to get you started:
   • Grand-tour question: “Can you describe to me the baseball park where you play with your team?”
   • Mini-tour question: “You mentioned you spend a lot of time in the dugout. Can you tell me more about what that looks like?”
   • Example question: “You said you throw lots of different pitches. What are some examples of pitches you throw?”
   • Experience question: “It sounds like the whole team had some interesting times in the dugout. What’s one of the most interesting experiences you’ve had there with teammates?”
   • Native-language question: “You told me sliders are one type of pitch you throw. Would you say in conversation, ‘I’m throwing a lot of sliders today?’”
3. Now, think about where in your interview you would ask the two questions that you created. Are some descriptive-question types better to ask early in the interview? Which ones? Do some descriptive-question types naturally lead to others? Which ones?

References

Khanal, T. (2016). Interview in ethnographic study: Issues and challenges. International Journal of Contemporary Applied Sciences, 3(4), 102-119.

Rapport, Nigel. (2020). The interview as a form talking-partnership: Dialectical, focused, ambiguous, special. In Skinner, J (Ed.), The Interview: An ethnographic approach. Routledge.

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

Westby, C., Burda, A., & Mehta, Z. (2003). Asking the right questions in the right ways: Strategies for ethnographic interviewing. The ASHA Leader, 8(8). https://leader.pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/leader.FTR3.08082003.4