Supplementary Interviewing Techniques to Maximize Output in Free Listing Tasks

Abstract

Free listing is an important ethnographic tool for defining semantic domains. However, when informants free list items from a particular domain, they often do not mention all items they know because they forget items and/or do not understand that they should list exhaustively. In this article, the author reviews results from research on three supplementary interviewing techniques to encourage full responding and enhance recall in such tasks (nonspecific prompting, reading back to the informant the items he or she free listed, and using free-listed items as semantic cues). These methods increase substantially the number of items elicited from individual informants and the number of items in a domain identified from informants in the aggregate. Moreover, these techniques do not require the interviewer to have any prior domain knowledge to be effective.