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Active Interview Tactics in Research on Public Deviants: Exploring the Two-Cop Personas

McMaster University

Michael Atkinson

Memorial University of Newfoundland

The need to establish and maintain good rapport with interviewees is a methodological axiom supported by most social scientists. Some say we place unnecessary limits on data collection, however, when respondents' statements are simply accommodated. More innovative approaches are especially needed to account for varying roles and their narratives, as Goffman would have it, at different frontstage and backstage levels. Sociological focus on tolerable deviance—with emphasis on public deviance by those who promote wider tolerance through situated claims making—presents a research challenge of this nature. The interviews in this article with tattoo artists and drug reform advocates combine attention to rapport with more confrontational tactics, aiming to elicit from informants an array of interpretive standpoints. The authors term this technique "good cop, bad cop."

Key Words: ethnography • active interview strategies • social construction of deviance • claims making • discursive analysis

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