(Salle F08)

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  Strebel, Ignaz (University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh)

Standardisation in the Making : The Work of ad hoc Street Interviewing

In the last decade the debate about survey interviewing in social sciences has turned from a critical and rejecting attitude to an interest into the understanding of standardized interviewing as scientifi c instrument and cultural artefact. Whilst research into standardized interviewing has mainly been dealing with conversation in telephone survey this paper studies video recordings of a face-to-face delivery of a questionnaire in the largely uncontrolled and also uncontrollable setting of an open urban space. Attention will be paid on co-orientation of paths and bodies and how pen and clipboard become constitutive features of the interaction. This will be exemplifi ed on behalf of a front end of an interview. It will be examined how one of the main rules of standardized interviewing, “The interviewer reads the questions as they are written on the questionnaire sheet”, is produced and how the partners take a ‘reading position’. The paper will then discuss how passers-by are asked about their perception of open urban spaces and how the ‘object’ of quantitative research (in this case normative urban planning) is produced in situ. Amongst others, the paper will take into consideration gestures such as ‘pointing at the fl oor’ to understand how the interview partners shape a spatial and standardised grammar of the urban environment.