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This paper examines the interactional underpinnings of social scientific research. Based on a detailed examination of a two-hour research interview it describes aspects of the conversational practices through which social scientific knowledge is generated. Put critiques of interview research have been somewhat unilateral in their focus, typically examining how researchers impose understandings on their subjects' reports. This paper moves beyond the unilateral focus to describe how researcher and subjects interact to mutually develop procedures for doing the actual research and collaboratively assemble their product. The analysis treats evaluative knowledge as a locally managed, interactional achievement. It stresses the practical, the situ character of how knowledge is co-produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to describe the shared orientations that are relied on in producing talk that is designed to elicit just that information that the speaker might want to know. If an interactant wants to find out something from a co-interactant, one of the ways of doing so is to directly ask about it. Information-eliciting tellings operate with respect to the participants' orienting to two types of knowables, designated in this paper as type 1 and type 2. Type 1 knowables are those that subject actors as subject actors have rights and obligations to know. For example, ones name, what one is doing, and so on are assumed to be available to a competent subject-actor. Type 2 knowables are those that subject actors are assumed to have access to by virtue of the knowings being occasioned. The recipient's work, as subject-actor, involves finding an event that will fit with and account for that which was reportedly experienced by the prior speaker.

This article focuses on a study of how people talk about their troubles. Participants to a conversation in which troubles are reported are engaged in proposing that some event or situation is both a problematic departure from the course of ordinary events that warrants special treatment and is manageable in such a way that it need not drastically interfere with their familiar, everyday activities. Further, the downgraded conventional response can provide that, should there be a trouble, the actual telling of it will be negotiable. Another sort of negotiation that may be involved has to do with whose trouble it is and, thus, how it will be talked about. The possibilities raised in the forgoing considerations will now be brought to bear on a single, extended interchange that will be examined segment by segment. This article focuses on one device with which this dual aspect of "troubles-talk" is present: the "trouble-premonitory" response to inquiry.