Goals

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

1. Define structural questions to use in an ethnographic interview.
2. Identify relevant and useful topic-appropriate structural questions.
3. Analyze connections between structural questions, domains, and other ethnographic interview questions.
4. Create structural questions that establish culture- and topic-specific domains for an ethnographic interview.

Your Informant’s Language—Why It Is Important

Using your informant’s native language is particularly important for understanding their culture and viewpoint during an ethnographic interview. This means, as an ethnographer, you want your informant to provide explanations and details using the words, phrases, and ideas that they are used to and that they use to communicate with other insiders in their own culture—not words, phrases, and ideas that you suggest or use.

In fact, we want to prevent informants—the people providing you with information—from trying to translate or change their language to make their ideas easy to understand according to your words and ideas. Even though it’s understandable and often can clarify information for a speaker to help out a listener by using the listener’s language. When you conduct ethnographic research, you want to preserve the informant’s language whenever you can because that language is a key to seeing things from the informant’s viewpoint. Using your language instead hides or erases important meanings and relationships that the informant’s language communicates.

Therefore, one important goal in the ethnographic interview process is to establish categories and relationships between the words your informant uses. For example, consider the following brief conversation between the gamer-informant Jess and the interviewer Ramon, and think about what Ramon could do to make the interview provide even better information about gamer culture.

At this point, Ramon might write down in his notes that grinding is a term that gamers use for devoting a lot of time and hard work to a game. The conclusion Ramon drew isn’t incorrect, but it is missing important information. When Jess and other gamers use the term grinding, they don’t just mean working hard and spending time. They specifically mean “completing very repetitive tasks in a game over and over to build experience and gain benefits.” Some ways of working hard and spending time on a game—such as completing diverse and varied tasks, which are all different—actually, don’t fit into the term grinding that Jess was using.

This misunderstanding happened for two reasons. First, Ramon allowed Jess to rephrase her original statement in a new way. When she said, “I mean, a lot of hard work,” Jess thought it would be easier for Ramon to understand. This rephrasing could have tipped Ramon off to encourage Jess to use her own language, like she was going to originally when she used the term grinding. Second, Ramon missed the opportunity to ask some structural questions that would help him get to the heart of the word’s meaning and get more out of the interview even if he missed the clues that Jess was rephrasing in his language instead of hers.

Why Structural Questions Matter

An interview isn’t about you as the ethnographer passively asking and recording questions. Instead, you want to have an interactive interview in which you adapt to what your informant says to create new understanding (Khanal, 2016). Structural questions are questions that help you establish a structure or framework for the words and ideas that your informant uses in their native language. Using structural questions is a way to establish categories and to understand the relationships between terms within those categories, including which terms belong in which category. It’s up to you as the ethnographer to look for opportunities to establish these categories and to recognize the terms that belong in each category.

Using Structural Questions to Establish Categories and Identify Terms

For example, take a look at the following conversation snippet between Ramon and Jess, and think about why Ramon asks the questions that he does.

In that conversation, Ramon is establishing the party-members category and the terms in that category.

Domains

This is a good place to think about domains. Domains in ethnographic research are symbolic categories that include other categories (Spradley, 2016). This can sound complicated, but domains are simpler than you might think—a few examples can help make this clear. Think big to small: Cars is a domain because the term cars is a category that also includes sub-categories, such as SUVs, electric cars, sports cars, and many others. A domain has a cover term, in this example, it is cars, which is the term used for the entire domain. The domain also has sub-categories or included terms, which are the kinds or types inside that domain—electric cars and sports cars, for example, are in the cars domain.

Establishing domains is key to building understanding in an ethnographic interview. By asking questions, Ramon is starting to better understand the domain, party members, and the terms included in this domain: healers, rogues, damage dealers, and tanks. The question types that Ramon asks to understand that domain and its included terms are called structural questions.

Structural-Question Types

Structural questions, in combination with the other ethnographic interview question types, such as descriptive questions and contrast questions, all help us to understand the social situations that your informant experiences. At the same time, these questions help us to make sense of how our informants see those situations according to their own perspectives (Westby et al., 2003). Structural questions can take a few specific forms, including verification questions, and cover-term questions. There are also some activity-type questions that you can use to get information, including substitution-frame questions and card-sorting questions. In a different way, each structural-question type helps you to establish the domains your informant is talking about (Spradley, 2016).

Verification Question

The simplest structural-question type is the verification question. In this question type, ask your informant to verify that your conclusion about the relationship between terms is correct.

In these examples, you as the interviewer have an idea that some terms are bigger domain examples, but ask the informant to make sure—to verify.

You can also ask verification questions to verify that a domain exists in the first place.

And you can ask verification questions to verify that a term belongs inside a larger domain, such as asking a camper informant about their equipment:

You can even use verification questions to make sure your informant is using their native language:

Whenever you are making an educated guess at a relationship between terms, and you ask your informant to confirm it, you are asking verification questions.

Cover-Term Questions

Another structural-question type is the cover-term question. In this question type, you hear your informant say a term that seems to refer to a domain—this is known as a cover term. However, you don’t know its relationship to other words or what terms belong in the domain. Therefore, ask your informant. For example, to follow up on the idea that there are many kinds of chef’s knives, you might ask the chef:

Ideally, this questioning leads to a terms list that all belong to that domain. When you think you have found a cover term—a name for a domain, but you don’t know what belongs in that domain—ask a cover-term question.

Included-Term Questions

Another structural-question type is an included-term question. In this question type, you hear your informant say multiple terms that all seem to belong to a domain, but you aren’t sure what that domain is. For example, you might have heard a chef talk about a wire whisk and a microplane. You might ask:

If the chef confirms they are both kinds of kitchen tools, then you know wire whisk and microplane are both included terms in the kitchen-tools domain. When you have found related terms, but you don’t know the bigger domain, ask an included-term question.

Structural-Question Activities

Finally, in addition to verification questions, cover-term questions, and included-term questions, there are a few special activity-type structural questions. We’ll describe two activity-question types that are useful and interesting ways to learn more from your informant: the substitution-frame question activity and the card-sorting question activity.

Substitution-Frame Question Activity

In the substitution-frame question activity, write down a statement that your informant made and remove a word, phrase, or sentence to create a fill-in-the-blank that your informant can fill in with their own new words or phrases. For example, if an airplane pilot says:

Remove one term to create the following fill-in-the-blank.

This activity is an opportunity to learn more activities that happen before takeoff. Asking the airplane pilot to come up with as many terms as they can to fill in the blank will help you find more items that belong in that domain.

Card-Sorting Question Activity

In the card-sorting question activity, create a list with terms and ask your informant to sort them. You can also use cards, such as flashcards or index cards. For example, make a safety checklist and ask the airplane pilot informant to see which terms belong and which ones don’t.

You could also ask your informant to sort in a different way.

Important Questioning Techniques

Note that whichever structural question type you’re asking, there are a few important ideas to keep in mind to help your interview go smoothly. You might have to ask structural questions many times to get the responses you’re looking for—an informant might not remember all the kitchen tools they use or the complete airplane safety checklist the first time you ask. Provide your informant with multiple opportunities and look for the best places to ask these questions again. It’s a good idea to mix in other question types, too. If you ask too many structural questions all at once, things can get too repetitive or boring, and your informant may lose interest in the interview. Techniques like asking follow-up questions, pausing, nodding, and repeating what the informant says all show interest and encourage more responses (Jordan, 2012). Also, ask other question types in between, such as descriptive questions, and look for opportunities to interest and encourage your informant while you ask structural questions.

Finally, so that your informant feels more comfortable answering your questions, it often helps to explain to them why you are asking structural questions and what you hope to gain from them. Provide your informant with some context for a question, such as:

Note that in this example, the question is about the informant’s culture of chefs: “the kitchen tools you and other chefs use,” rather than about the informant personally. Making this clear helps you achieve your purpose—making ethnographic conclusions about chefs, rather than just one chef.

Conclusion

Structural questions are key tools in your ethnographer’s toolbox. They help you to build a language framework using insider terms and relationships to better understand your informant’s culture, ideas, and viewpoint.

Practice

Revisit the following questions that Ramon asked Jess about party members during their gaming conversation:

• So, grinding is about putting in a lot of work and a lot of time?
• So, party members are different kinds of players who make up your team in the game?
• It sounds like healers are one kind of party member in your party?
• What about tanks? I remember you talking about them before—are tanks also a type of party member?

Let’s engage in a reflection activity about contrast questions. Take some time to reflect on the questions below. Feel free to jot down your ideas and insights.

• Can you figure out which structural-question type Ramon asked and when he asked them? Try to identify the specific structural-question type that each of Ramon’s questions represented.
• What are Ramon’s specific goals when using each structural-question type? Think about the relationship between the terms he is trying to uncover.

Now, let’s shift gears a bit. Imagine that you have a topic you’re interested in researching or even just a topic you want to learn more about. If you were to conduct an interview on this topic, think about the structural-question types you’d want to use at different interview stages.

• What structural-question types would you use near the interview’s beginning? How about in the middle? And what question types would be most effective towards the end?

References

Jordan, D. (2012, April 29). Quick tips for ethnographic interviewing (A guide for college students). University of California San Diego. https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/resources/InterviewingTips.html

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

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