Edward Rose and linguistic ethnography: an Ethno-inquiries approach to interviewing

Abstract

This article discusses the `Ethno-inquiries', founded by Edward Rose, and the analytic affinities with Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks established in the formative development of Ethnomethodology. The article introduces the Ethno-inquiries approach to sociological interviews. Using a project that captured ordinary, oral accounts of the 1996 bombing of Manchester, England, this article shows how the epistemological and methodological attitude of the Ethno-inquiries towards talk — recognizing the linguistic constitution of the social world, avoiding methodological irony, letting informants rather than analysts organize topics — affords fine-grained analyses of ordinary actions within extraordinary events. This article discusses important aspects of interviewing including data gathering and the nature of `interview data', the selection of interviewees and getting the story. A series of vignettes demonstrates the enabling potential of this analytic attitude towards people's accounts.