Introduction

The three interviews that are central to this volume are part of a corpus of interviews collected by Margaret Wetherell. The corpus is described in Wetherell and Potter (1992: 98–100 and 221–224). These interviews were conducted from within a conversational perspective on social research:

This approach to research interviews acknowledges the intrinsic interactional nature of the interview situation. Interviews (even those that are conducted from the orthodox point of view) are conversations between an interviewer and a respondent. Hence they have properties that any human interaction has. They are open-ended, unpredictable, situation-bound, open to negotiation, and vulnerable to misunderstandings. In addition, the content of the interaction is influenced by emotional and relational factors (Cicourel 1964: chapter 3; Mazeland and Ten Have 1996). These properties preclude interactional materials from being fully interpretable out of context, within fixed interpretative coding schemata. The question then is, how to make use of interview materials in analysis?

In this paper, I propose to answer this question by considering interviews as based on frames. First, I will sketch a framework for the description of interviews as framed activities.