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The chapter analyzes in-depth interviews, defined as a fundamental tool for generating empirical knowledge through asking people to talk about certain themes. It looks at the main approaches that have made use of qualitative interviews, observing that they have been preferred, especially where the researcher is aiming to make a detailed description. Attention is paid to the process and interest taken in the interpretations interviewees give of the process itself. The chapter addresses the different steps of a research design based on in-depth interviews, with attention to the specific challenges of research on social movements: the questions to ask and how to ask them; strategies for the selection of interviewees, based mainly on theoretical considerations rather than randomness; the delicate relations between interviewers and interviewees; and how in-depth interviews are analyzed by social movement researchers.

One of the aims of this book was to outline a method-in-practice and to illustrate how it is possible to construct in-depth case histories from a qualitative longitudinal archive. This chapter begins with a discussion of the biographical methodology, outlining the value and importance of biographical and longitudinal approaches and explaining how case histories can be formed from the data archive of repeat in-depth interviews. It also formulates some of the challenges faced by those working with repeat interviews, and explores the boundaries between primary and secondary analysis that marks longitudinal research. The chapter then outlines the design of the original Inventing Adulthoods study, before describing and evaluating the analytic strategies employed in producing the case histories presented from Chapters Four to Seven.

Although structural semiotics has origins in the dual disciplines of communication science and anthropology, many commercial semioticians limit their practice to the analysis of texts such as advertising, popular media, and cultural phenomena, to the exclusion of consumer research. Some practicing semioticians even advertise that semiotics does not apply to consumer behavior. However, a cursory look at the academic literature makes it clear that the object of semiotics is not limited to textual analysis, but applies to a wide range of human experiences, including social organization (Hodge and Kress 1988), cinema spectating (Metz [1976] 1981), the flow of traffic in a mall (Oswald 2015), and even animal behavior (Sebeok 1972). Furthermore, in the course of twenty years of consulting to blue chip companies, it is clear that the object of semiotics is not limited to textual analysis, but also applies to a wide range of marketing factors including consumer-centered design strategy, cultural branding, and media planning. This chapter illustrates how semiotics can be applied to standard qualitative research methods to gain deeper insights, encourage respondent creativity, and improve the consistency and validity of findings for the client. Christian Pinson contributes an early essay on marketing semiotics research.

This chapter reflects on in-depth interview dynamics and strategies that shape data collection and quality in studies of returning prisoners. The author discusses qualitative research design and goals, data collection in the field, and key factors shaping success in the field. She draws on interview data, along with criminal history, institutional release data, and contact logs to reflect on what made participant retention more likely, what hindered retention, and strategies to improve it. While it is challenging to maintain connections with returning prisoners over time, especially those who are particularly disadvantaged and marginalized, maintaining these ties provides crucial information to understanding the process of reentry. Attempts at maintaining contact, even when unsuccessful, also provide important insight into these experiences. At the same time, there are important ethical considerations for researchers to keep in mind.

After several months of unsuccessful job searching most American white-collar job seekers come to feel that there is something wrong with them. This chapter links this self-blame to the structure of the chemistry game—the discourses and practices underlying American white-collar job searching. The chemistry game’s premises that job seekers can control their career fates by mastering self-presentation techniques while networking and interviewing are initially comforting, but ultimately backfire by leaving job seekers with only themselves to blame for their unemployment. Moreover, job seekers’ attempts to create rapport while networking or interviewing require a specific form of emotional labor that renders them vulnerable to highly personalized forms of self-blame and perceptions of deep internal flaws. This form of self-blame often results in debilitating discouragement. In this context job search support organizations and discourses seeking to provide hope to job seekers by amplifying singular success stories only reinforce the premise of individual control and self-blame. Similarly, the self-help insistence on the imperative of maintaining a positive attitude undermines the open sharing of hardships among unemployed job seekers.

This introductory chapter lays out the foundations of this book's study, by first defining several keywords used throughout the text, then by exploring previous literature regarding intergroup couples and building up a conceptual framework (derived from feminist approaches to difference and interpersonal relationships) for the study. Moreover, this study uses a qualitative research method—in-depth personal interviews—to study intercultural couples. Qualitative methods are most appropriate for the investigation of close relationship processes such as relational maintenance and conflict, hence, the study uses dozens of in-depth interviews with persons living in mixed domestic partnerships representing a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, religious, socioeconomic, and national backgrounds. In-depth interviews allow access the processes by which couple partners negotiated meaning and from their own perspectives made sense of their lives together.

Self-blame—one of the most painful dimensions of the unemployment experience of American white-collar workers—is virtually non-existent among Israeli white-collar job seekers who attribute their labor-market difficulties to defects in the “system” and not in themselves. This chapter links system-blame to the practices and experiences of job searching in the specs game. Job search practices, which may be assumed to be universal, such as writing résumés and interviewing, take on different meanings and require different forms of emotional labor in different institutional contests. This chapter describes how the structure of the specs game gives rise to a distinct job search experience, and how that experience generates the widely shared Israeli perception that it is not job search strategies that determine job search outcomes, but external factors that are outside job seekers’ immediate control. Unemployed Israelis end up feeling objectified and dehumanized by the hiring system and betrayed by the Israeli state.

This introductory chapter describes the background of this study as well as the theoretical approaches to be used; in particular, the chapter defines and expands on the concepts of intersectionality and agency as applied to immigrant women. There is a growing number of women migrants within the United States and internationally, yet despite their burgeoning community these women remain invisible to the public imagination. Thus, the chapter goes on to introduce the research methods involved in attempting to rectify this issue—in-depth interviews and an analysis of existing data from the U.S. Census—and maps out the particular demographics to be interviewed and studied for the remainder of this book.