Quests for Questioners

Offering qualitative researchers an entree into the world of working with archival repositories and special collections, this volume also serves as a primer for students and researchers who might not be familiar with these sorts of collections.

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Responding to the increasing interest in what has become known as the “archival turn,” Quests for Questioners: Inventive Approaches to Qualitative Interviews is a research volume written by many of today’s leading practitioners. Offering qualitative researchers an entrée into the world of working with archival repositories and special collections, it also serves as a primer for students and researchers who might not be familiar with these sorts of collections. It is especially helpful to novice researchers seeking a general introduction into how special collections are created and how they can be used. Quests for Questioners offers useful, clear guidance on a variety of topics, including:

using different types of archives
developing topics for research within the archives
assessing materials available
advising on how to work with archivists and curators
documenting the research process, and writing up an archival study


Archival records and material culture (including manuscripts, documents, audio- and video-recordings, and visual and material culture) housed in special collections can provide a wealth of resources for qualitative researchers seeking to conduct research in the social sciences. This book invites researchers to experiment with the many ways in which in-person individual interviews and focus groups have expanded to include a variety of sensory methods to assist in the generation of verbal descriptions, a range of culturally responsive approaches to work with individuals and groups, and diverse re-theorizations of interviews that draw on new materialist approaches to the analysis and interpretation of data. Quest for Questioners serves as a springboard for students and researchers who may be familiar with designing studies that use individual interviews and focus groups, but have not yet explored approaches to interview research that involve object, visual, and graphic elicitation methods, post qualitative approaches to qualitative inquiry, and culturally responsive methodologies.

This book provides students and active researchers guidance on how to make interviews work in creative ways that go beyond traditional, well-used forms. As a whole, it explores how researchers can adapt, re-invent, and even reject interview methods to explore social problems in inventive ways. It is an excellent teaching text for such classes as introductory research methods, introductory qualitative methods, qualitative research design, interview research, and qualitative data collection.