Introduction

In interviews, an interviewer and a respondent meet at an arranged time for an encounter with an agreed aim. Both parties must do quite a lot of work to achieve this aim, which is the production of “interview data.” In a technical sense, the aim of the interview has been achieved if the respondent's talk during the interview has been recorded. The recording then can be taken away from the interview setting to the researcher's workplace, where it can be manipulated (transcribed, interpreted, analyzed) by the researcher. From the respondent's perspective, the aim of the interview has been achieved if she has been able to express her ideas about the topics of the interview, and if she is satisfied that the recorded talk represents what she wanted to tell the interviewer and how she wanted to represent herself. From the researcher's perspective, the aim of the interview has been achieved if she has been able to elicit (and record) talk from the respondent that can be transformed (transcribed and reduced) into the data that she wants to get for analysis.

In this volume we deal with data produced in interviews aimed at eliciting talk that would exhibit the ways in which white New Zealanders (Pakehas) make distinctions between their own group and others, and that in the subsequent analysis could be analyzed as instances of “the language of racism” (Wetherell and Potter 1992).