Ethnographic Interview

The ethnographic interview, formalized by James Spradley, is a deliberately staged conversation whose goal is to discover how an insider categorizes and talks about their own cultural world rather than to test the researcher's categories. It proceeds through a developmental research sequence of question types — broad grand-tour questions, fine-grained descriptive questions, structural questions that probe how knowledge is organized, and contrast questions that surface the distinctions informants draw between terms. The point is not a list of facts but a reconstructed map of meanings expressed in the informant's own native terms.