Review Essay: Paradigm Wars Around Interview Methodologies: Constructionism and Postmodernism 'on tap' or 'on top'?

Two overlapping volumes extracted from the Handbook of interview research are seen as providing a considerable variety and depth of useful technical advice for qualitative researchers and a plethora of ideological warfare and confu­sion which helps nobody. Chapters on a range of types of more or less reluctant respondents and on phone and computer-aided interviewing (on and off the Web) are followed by chapters on tran­scription and on computer-aided (or not) qualitat­ive analysis and interpretation from a variety of positions. Questions of representation are addres­sed. The review argues that post-modernist and constructivist practice can be a useful tactic in a struggle for a more reflexive and subtle researched understanding, but (as a philosophy competing for dominance) they make up a counter-productive "American ideology" which is self-contradictory, and personally and politically unhelpful. "On tap", yes; "on top", no! URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0401309