Conversational Knowledge and Gifts of Chance: On the State of the Method

Abstract

For more than 15 years, I have been an active qualitative researcher, working in particular with semistructured qualitative interviews, both in empirical research projects and as an author of textbooks on interviewing. In this state of the method article, I first articulate an approach to qualitative inquiry based on the fundamental idea of the conversation on ontological, epistemological, and methodological grounds. I then diverge a bit from standard methodological approaches to qualitative research and introduce the notion of gifts of chance: As conversational creatures, we sometimes stumble upon interesting and thought-provoking conversations that we may analyze in a knowledge-producing process, even if this process has not been carefully planned and designed. As an example, I refer to an ongoing research project I now conduct with a woman in her 90s, which began when she contacted me unexpectedly as a veritable gift of chance.