999009

earch-article2021
QRJ0010.1177/1468794121999009Qualitative ResearchSand et al.

Article Q
Re-thinking research R
interview methods through Qualitative Research

the multisensory constitution 2022, Vol. 22(4) 594–612

© The Author(s) 2021

of place
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DOI: 10.1177/1468794121999009
https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794121999009
journals.sagepub.com/home/qrj

Anne-Lene Sand, Helle Marie Skovbjerg

and Lene Tanggaard
Design School Kolding, Denmark

Abstract
This paper highlights a methodological vagueness within the existing qualitative research interview
literature related to reflecting where interviews takes place. The aim is to interrogate how the use
of the concept of emplaced participation can account for the multisensory constitution of place
within interviews as well as how the place can provide an opportunity to generate knowledge
about participants’ everyday practices. Casey’s understanding of place as a gathering and Pink’s
perspectives on emplaced participation provide a sensitive epistemological approach that can
be applied by researchers outside the field of ethnography. Based on empirical ethnographic
material from fieldwork in Denmark, this paper makes a novel contribution to how researchers
can use sensory and emplaced experience before and during an interview. We argue that, if we
cease taking emplaced dimensions for granted, new methodological techniques can be developed,
which, in turn, can lead to new types of knowledge of practice.

Keywords
Research interview, reflective interviewing, interview place, multi-sensoriality, emplacement

Introduction
In this article, we interrogate the benefits of exploring and using place as a methodologi-
cal tool when conducting qualitative research interviews. The purpose is to contribute to
qualitative research interviews literature with knowledge of how interview methodolo-
gies can be developed through rethinking the importance of place and how researchers
can work methodologically to activate the importance of place in the context of research
interviewing. We illustrate our argument using data from a research project about young

Corresponding author:
Helle Marie Skovbjerg, Lab for Design for Play, Design School Kolding, Ågade 10, Kolding 6000, Denmark.
Email:skovbjerg@dskd.dk
Sand et al. 595

people and their sensory construction of urban places (Sand, 2017). The point is that
qualitative research interviews can lean on insights from ethnography without spending
a large amount of time on fieldwork as ethnographers commonly do.
In Scandinavian countries, Kvale’s (1997) semi-structured interview method is one of
the most recognized and utilized interview methods among researchers. The strength of
Kvale’s (1997: 91–158) work lies in its detailed procedures for conducting a research
interview and how a dialogue takes shape as an interaction between the interviewer and
interviewee. However, within this rather thorough methodological development, the spe-
cific intersection of the interviewer, interviewee, and interview place is rather over-
looked. In a recent reconceptualization of Kvale’s work, Kvale and Brinkmann (2015:
146) acknowledge that there is a tendency to undermine the importance of place and
materiality within qualitative interviews, emphasizing that much could be learned if
humanistic scholars stop taking emplaced and material dimensions for granted. While
this methodological gap is not discussed within their work, they call for methodological
attention and further investigation.
In this paper, we identified two main concerns within the existing literature on quali-
tative research interview methodologies: First, the notion of place is only vaguely dis-
cussed and conceptualized. The aim of this paper is to contribute with a theoretical
conceptualization from which place can be understood within qualitative research inter-
view studies. Second, we identify a lack of knowledge about how researchers can acti-
vate a sensitivity that is embodied and related to research participants’ everyday practices.
In relation to this gap, this paper represents a novel contribution in developing a theoreti-
cal understanding of researchers’ emplaced participation, which, in dialogue with empir-
ical material, develops hands-on strategies to use when interviewing.
The theoretical development in this paper is based on Michel de Certeau’s everyday
perspective and the work of Casey (1996), who developed an idea of place based on
existential phenomenology inspired by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and Merleau-
Ponty’s argument that perception stems from embodied interactions. Such a framework
rejects the traditional idea that place is a background for experiences, feelings, and
explorations and suggests instead that place is integrated in human existence, which
includes the interview setting. Lastly, we apply Pink’s (2008, 2009, 2011) perspective of
emplaced participation, which provides the potential to stimulate and reflect sensory
dimensions constructed between the interviewer and place. This paper consists of three
analytical sections that reflect the four dimensions of interviewing through the multisen-
sory constitution of place.

Literature on qualitative research interview methodologies

The literature on qualitative research interview methodologies reveals a tendency to treat
places as a tabula rasa—that is, as a blank or empty phenomenon (Sin, 2003: 306). The
place of the interview is often left to the interviewer to decide (Alder and Alder, 2002:
528), and considerations related to place are often reduced to dimensions such as the
researchers’ own convenience and comfort (Herzog, 2005), instead of considering
whether researchers could learn from the interviewee’s choice of place (Alder and Alder,
2002). However, recent developments within the methodological literature on how to
596 Qualitative Research 22(4)

conduct research interviewing have been increasingly searching for a greater emphasis
on the situational and interactive aspects of interviewing, calling for more reflective
interviewing (Roulston, 2010, 2014) and suggesting that more attention be paid to the
power relations and interactional dimensions of interviewing (Tanggaard, 2007, 2009;
Kvale, 2006; Roulston, 2010, 2014) in addition to discursive interviewing (Kvale and
Brinkmann, 2015). This suggests that the situation of the interview and how it informs
knowledge production should be considered and reflected upon during the interview
(Roulston, 2010). However, in a recent review of interview methodologies with an
emphasis on interviewing styles, the importance of place and the co-constitution or inter-
section of interview themes and place are not mentioned at all (Berner-Rodoreda et al.,
2020). In fact, it seems as if this subject is absent in the literature as a productive element
of interviewing.
Overlooking place is not out of the ordinary when viewed through the lens of the his-
tory of qualitative research interviewing. In a review of the history of qualitative research
interviews, Brinkmann (2013) takes us back to Socratic interviewing and Freud’s psy-
choanalytic interviewing. Later, interviewing became popular and was widely used in
clinical diagnosis and counselling concerned with the quality of response, and, secondly,
interviewing became popular in psychological testing (Fontana and Prokos, 2007: 13).
What is interesting in this context is that counselling and psychological testing are often
understood as intersubjective events not constituted by place but by the quality of con-
versation. Research interviews have been seen as a ‘universal mode of systematic
inquiry’ (Fontana and Prokos, 2007: 11)—not formed by where but more by how.
Newer trends in qualitative interviewing seem to take inspiration from ethnography,
for example, through recognizing that interviewers are not neutral entities and that inter-
views are not neutral tools but are instead shaped by the situation where they take place
(Fontana and Prokos, 2007: 83). Adding to this, recent developments within qualitative
inquiry based on post-structuralism ask us to revisit basic ideas of qualitative inquiry to
more creatively explore what happens through research inquiries understood as ‘the con-
crete encounter with the real’ (Sct Pierre, 2018). Research encounters take place, which
we must consider more thoroughly as researchers. Pink (2009) notes that, no matter the
type of interview, each research encounter is invariably embodied. It is therefore a prob-
lem if ‘standard interviews are conducted without attention as to how visual, audible,
olfactory or tactile stimuli play a role in creating the interview. Some small details or
layers of place experience may be lost’ (Trell and Van Hoven, 2010: 92). In Roulston’s
(2018: 326) analysis of the tools of action to use when conducting interviews, there is no
mention of place as an interview tool. In ‘Learning to interview in the social sciences’,
Roulston et al. (2003) present a study of how to teach qualitative interviewing, but there
are no considerations of the importance of place during the teaching of interviewing.
This is not a critique of these papers but rather an indication of the need to focus more
exclusively on the importance of considering place when interviewing and teaching
research interviewing. Hence, we call for methodological developments of how it is pos-
sible to consider place when interviewing even though the time is limited.
Selected relevant studies illustrate that the interaction between the interview and
place influences the construction of knowledge within the interview. Alder and Alder
(2002: 258) criticize the fact that the place of the interview is often chosen by the
Sand et al. 597

researcher, and they also argue that a researcher should learn from the interviewee’s
choice of place. Anderson et al. (2010) move away from conventional interview methods
based on dialogue toward a method that explicitly integrates considerations about place.
With a focus on situated ethics, they argue that the way in which researchers situate
themselves within an interview situation generates knowledge about how political
aspects can influence the specific place and conversation taking place (Anderson et al.,
2010: 600). Elwood and Martin (2000: 655) encourage scholars to think about the mean-
ing and potential importance of place when planning an interview. Furthermore, the lit-
erature on walk-along interviews shows that this can be particularly useful in ascertaining
people's local and embodied relationships in interview situations (Hand et al., 2017;
Kusenbach, 2003; Vannini and Vannini, 2017). Vannini and Vannini (2017: 179) state
that ‘walking has a tremendous potential to animate spatial and sensory dynamics which
static modes of inquiry cannot quite scrutinize’, but they also critically argue that

walk-alongs, by and in large, are still too often informed by textualism, cognitivism, and
representationalism. Walk-alongs are too often not sensuous enough, not spatialized enough,
not mediated coherently enough, and not imaginative enough. Walk- alongs are also often too
methodical, systematic, and pre-determined by a priori research agendas.

Pointing to the methodological challenge of being pre-determined by research agen-

das we will draw on literature and perspectives from ethnography and attempts to situate
a sensory a-where-ness within interview situations.

Research context
The empirical material applied within this paper was generated from fieldwork con-
ducted as part of the author’s doctoral fieldwork (Sand, 2017; Sand and Hakim-
Fernandez, 2018). The fieldwork was characterized as multi-sited (Hannerz, 2003), since
the author explored a self-organized practice among 38 people in urban places using
methods such as sensory and emplaced observation (Pink, 2008; Spradley, 1980), pho-
tography (Pink, 2007), and multiple interview genres, including photo-elicitation
(Harper, 2002) and walk-and-talks (Kusenback, 2003). Self-organization is a phenome-
non that refers to how young people and adults choose to organize themselves outside of
institutional spaces. This means that, to a large extent, the practices studied within this
fieldwork had taken place as an empirical and analytical object.

Place and sense of emplacing interviews

In the following, we will present a theoretical framework for developing the qualitative
interview through the multisensory constitution of place. We will apply de Certeau’s
(1984) concept of practice, Casey’s concept of place, and Pink’s ideas of emplacement in
interviewing. de Certeau (1984) applies an understanding of everyday practice that
focuses on specific ways of doing. Practice is about people’s ‘making’, ‘doing’, ‘the
lived’, and ‘ways of operating’ (de Certeau, 1984: xiii–xiv). According to de Certeau,
practice consists of well know ways of doing everyday life, and, at the same time, there
598 Qualitative Research 22(4)

is a strangeness inherent in everyday life, which is only visible to the outside to a certain
extent. What might seem strange to an outsider can be obvious and comfortable to a
person familiar with the practice. In order to gain insight into the familiarity of a practice,
several anthropologists argue that one has to participate in the lived everyday life of
people studied. Even though it is not possible to study a practice or phenomenon over
time, we must focus on everyday practices by trying to move beyond the knowledge
generated by pre-constructed questions (jf. Spradley, 1979).
Casey (1996: 18) argues, ‘To live is to live locally and to know is first of all to know
the place one is in’. He characterizes place as an event that is constantly occurring and
changing, and he furthermore relates the on-going construction to embodied practices:
‘Culture is carried into places by bodies’ (Casey, 1996: 34). Casey (1996: 23) unfolds
this argument as follows:

A giving place may certainly be perduring and consistent, but this does not mean that it is
simply something inactive and at rest [. . .] Part of the power of place, its very dynamism, is
found in its encouragement of motion in its midst.

This formulation is essential in order to understand that places cannot be treated as

static or a tabula rasa (jf. Sin, 2003) and to raise awareness of the importance of sensory
methodologies to grasp the multisensory constitution of place.
Pink (2008, 2009, 2011) has contributed to the development of sensory methodolo-
gies together with a number of scholars (Feld and Basso, 1996; Howes, 2005; Seremetakis,
1994). Referring to Howes’ (2005) work on the body–mind–environment concept, Pink
(2008) methodically develops her perspective on embodiment toward emplacement, ask-
ing how researchers themselves are emplaced in ethnographic contexts. Pink (2008: 354)
states:

Moving from a theory of embodiment to one of emplacement, that recognises the competing/
performing body as part of an ecology of things in progress offers a series of analytical
advantages. It locates the performing/competing body within a wider ecology, allowing us to
see it as an organism in relation to other organisms and its representations in relation to other
representations. It should recognise both the specificity and intensity of the place event and its
contingencies, but also the historicity of processes and their entanglements.

According to Pink, developing theory from embodiment to emplacement acknowledges

that the body is situated. In other words, the focus and articulation of emplacement it
opens up analytical advantages, providing opportunities to grasp and reflect upon how
bodies are a part of a wider context. In relation to interviewing, the researcher is always
physically and socially placed together with the interviewee, which, as Pink notices,
provides a methodological and analytical opportunity for investigating how body, place,
and everyday life are dialectically constituted. Being emplaced includes the body of the
researcher and how the emplacement of the interview will influence what can be said or
might be said. Furthermore, emplaced as a researcher includes the body of the inter-
viewee and how she or he is situated and emplaced in everyday life. In order to activate
emplacement within interviews, new procedures are needed.
Sand et al. 599

Within the next section, we will analyze how it is possible to understand the emplace-
ment of the interview situation from a theoretical perspective and furthermore suggest
specific methodological strategies and procedures for activating place as a part of the
interview situation.

Analysis
The empirical analysis is divided into four thematic sections. First, in reflecting and
developing new methods, we explore how the researcher in the empirical material we
draw from had to think about place due to the construction of the study. Second, in inter-
view as emplacement, we discuss how a researcher attunes his or her senses toward a
specific place. Third, in place as gathering, we analyze how place can be understood as
a gathering that leads to an understanding of the way in which people frame the places
they use. Fourth, in asking emplaced questions, we bring attention to how sensory reflex-
ivity toward emplaced practices can generate new types of questions about people’s eve-
ryday lives. The four analytical sections provide a theoretical foundation for integrating
place in interview methodologies and, at the same time, provide practical tools for use in
interview situations.

Analysis 1: reflecting and developing new methods

In this study, constructing an anthropological field (Amit, 2000) in an urban space was
methodologically demanding due to the fast-shifting use of methods suitable for the social
field. The field, in this specific study, was constantly on the move, and it was difficult to
gain access in a social field, where young people, who knew each other, used different
urban places together. This methodological challenge led to another methodological
reflection concerning how the author of the specific study could gain entrance to a social
field. She explored the challenge methodologically by bringing a friend to participate dur-
ing walks and observations of young people’s use of urban space in evenings and on
weekends, which legitimized her participation among the young people who organized
their own concerts and event at abounded urban places. This strategy was used as a way
to make observations, establish contact, and recruit young people to interview. The
research participants confronted the author with questions such as ‘where shall we meet?’
This question led to a methodological reflection about what you do as a researcher within
a field not defined by an institution with relatively framed and defined places. Where
should we meet? Could their home or school be used as sites for interviewing, and why
should they be suitable given that the research question was not related to their school,
home, or family but rather to their social practices and use of urban space? Could I, as a
researcher, ask the same questions and achieve the same in-depth outcome at the young
people’s school as in the place where they normally hang out? How would the choice of
place influence the form and content of the interview? These questions led to a methodo-
logical exploration of how to activate place as an essential way of framing the interview.
Following Kvale’s (1997) semi-structured interview methodology, the author memorized
her interview guide and placed the physical note in my pocket. The questions were spe-
cifically related to how and why places as an abandoned factory, a place beneath a bridge
600 Qualitative Research 22(4)

and unused building along a railway were important to the research participants’ self-
organized practices. The author asked for permission to record each conversation, turned
on the Dictaphone, and placed it in her pocket while she walked with young people toward
their places. The interview typically began with introductory questions, such as: ‘how
would you describe this place to a person who is not familiar with it?’; ‘when and with
whom do you come here?’; ‘what does this place mean to you?’; ‘do you come here by
yourself or together with others?’; ‘is everyone allowed here?’; ‘is it inappropriate to do
certain things here?’; and ‘can you describe the feeling you have when you are here?’ A
central aspect of this fieldwork was that the participants chose the places of the interviews.
Thus, place became a way to understand their practices within an urban space.
The literature on qualitative research interviewing emphasizes calls for more reflec-
tive interviewing related to the situational and interactive aspects of the practice
(Roulston, 2010, 2014). Being methodologically reflexive by using the constraints rep-
resented by, for example, the question asked by the research participants (‘where shall
we meet?’) and being constantly curious about how we use methods to generate knowl-
edge as well as how they fit (or do not fit) in a given research context is a foundation for
the critical use of methods and rethinking and developing methodologies. Ethnography
scholars learn to constantly write down any analytical and methodological reflections
that might occur during even a short observation or spontaneous interview. The practice
of writing fieldnotes is also used in order to deal with preconceptions or pre-constructed
assumptions that might be otherwise difficult to note and reflect upon (Hammersley and
Atkinson, 1983). Writing down fieldnotes methodically can be used as a point of depar-
ture for bringing attention to how the interview is carried out and what circumstances
influence the process of interviewing. This practice would be useful for qualitative inter-
view researchers as well. Besides methodically writing notes, discussing methodological
challenges and reflections across disciplines can be a useful strategy to ensure that any
preconstructed assumptions are examined in a reflective way. This could be seen as an
example of peer validation (Kvale, 1997).

Analysis 2: the interview as emplacement

Over 3 years, four research participants, who were men in the early twenties, used a
specific urban place to organize unofficial concerts. The researcher was interested in
understanding how they were self-organized and how they found different urban places
useful in relation to their self-organized practices. During one phone conversation while
planning the research, one research participant asked, ‘where shall we meet?’ The author
was interested in the specific urban place and asked, ‘can we go to the place where you
organized and carried out the concerts?’ The participant’s voice showed excitement: ‘For
sure, we haven’t been there for a while’. The following is an extract of the author’s field
notes taken during and after the interview:

It is a Wednesday at 16 a.m., and we meet at the sandwich bar ‘Annette’s’. They are four
young men, in the beginning of their twenties, and they have white wine in a plastic bag. We
say ‘Hallo’, and they talk about previous experiences under the bridge as I follow them along
their route to their place: the place beneath the bridge of Ringgaden (Ringgadebroen, in
Sand et al. 601

Figure 1. The photograph illustrates the bridge that the research participants and researcher
climbed above during the interview. Photograph: Sand.

Danish). The atmosphere is a bit tight, but the rhythms of walking bring a type of calmness
to the situation as we talk. After five minutes, we arrive at the Bridge of Ringgade. They tell
me that the place is on the other side and beneath the bridge. We begin walking, and I assume
that we will walk to other side of the bridge, but at the middle of the bridge they suddenly
stop walking. With their bodies and face pointing to the side of the bridge, they, one by one,
climb across the steel railing, as if it was the most obvious thing to do (see figure 1). Their
actions start an adrenalin rush in my body. I like the excitement and feel increased curiosity
about what we are doing and where we are going. I do not enjoy the view since I am
uncomfortable with heights, and therefore I keep my eyes on the back of Troels, who moves
slowly and steadily in front of me. Simultaneously, I follow them and reflect: Why didn’t we
walk the normal way across the bridge? Why risk drawing attention from the surrounding
public space or even risk falling? I realized that this was their way of entering their place. But
why? The cars pass by, but the young men do not hesitate. I turn around and look over my
shoulder, just before I cross the cold steel railing. I stand on a small ledge. It almost feels like
flying, looking towards Aarhus city. There is a gate, which is locked. On the other side of the
gate there is a slight stair, which circles towards the ground and the train tracks that pass
beneath the bridge. One of the young men, Troels, turns around, when I cross the steel railing.
He asks me if I am okay, and he points toward the challenging path we approach, saying, ‘Do
you want me to carry your bag?’ I reply, ‘I am good’. (Field notes, 16 August 2011)

The empirical material illustrated above provides insight into how place can be explored
within an interview situation. The author was curious about the young people’s places
602 Qualitative Research 22(4)

and practices and how that place specifically aided them in terms of organizing concerts
by themselves. Pink (2009: 64) defines sensory ethnography as a process of learning
through the ethnographer’s own multisensory and emplaced experiences. When the
researcher’s sensorily emplaced experience becomes a part of their field notes, as illus-
trated above, it provides a basis for reflecting on the importance of place in relation to
sensory constructions of meaning. In the article ‘An urban tour’, Pink (2008: 193)
emphasizes the sensory dimensions of emplacement:

By attending to the sensoriality and materiality of other people’s ways of being in the world, we
cannot directly access their ‘collective’ memories, experiences or imaginations. However, we
can, by following their routes and attuning our bodies, rhythms, tastes, ways of seeing and more
to theirs, begin to make places that are similar to theirs, and thus feel that we are similarly
emplaced.

It is necessary to consider that Pink’s conceptualization of emplacement is developed in

relation to fieldwork that stretches over smaller or longer periods of time, but it is still
useful to understand how researchers apply multiple senses of the researcher’s body.
When using his or her own body as a sensory tool, the researcher obtains insights and
becomes a part of the production of place and emplaced practices. Activating the
emplaced experiences of the researcher made it possible to gain insight into the inter-
viewees’ everyday practices, how they use places in their everyday life, and the sensory
character of their practices. The emplaced experience elicited a number of reflections,
including: ‘why did they choose that route over the side of the bridge?’; ‘what does it tell
me about the way they meet and what they do in the city, and how they understand them-
selves within urban space?’; ‘what potential does this place have that other places do not
have?’; and ‘how can my sensory experience provide insight into their self-organized
practices?’
Sin (2003: 311) understands the interview process as dialectic and argues that ‘. . . the
feedback between the spatiality of the interview site and the construction of data in the
context of an interview is a two-way process that is ongoing throughout the duration of
the interview’. This point is illustrated through an interview with Mr. Chan, who chose
to be interviewed at a Chinese community center among 30 other elderly individuals.
The place of the interview provided information about how Mr. Chan positioned himself
in the community center and how being socially distanced from other elderly individuals
could be a way for Mr. Chan to position himself with authority. The example underlines
that the socio-spatial place of the interview contributes to the understanding of how inter-
viewees are capable of constructing a social self within the interview (Sin, 2003: 309).
For the qualitative researcher, this provides reflections on how and why people position
themselves within interviews.
It is essential for the researcher to reflect on the gathering of a place, which is also an
entanglement of the researcher’s own embodied sensory practices. Hence, it is important
to rethink the interview as a research method. In understanding an interview as a dialec-
tic, co-constituting dialogue between an interviewer and interviewee (Kvale, 1997;
Roulston, 2010; Rowling et al., 2015), it has the potential to become a multisensory
method that emerges dialectically between the people involved and the place of the
Sand et al. 603

interview. As seen in the extracts of the field notes, tactility, sound, sight, and adrenaline
are senses that were used going to the place of the interview and hereby activated before
the actual interview conversation.
Researchers need to ask themselves how the interview place is chosen and how
places can co-constitute the site of research practices and their results. Researchers
would also benefit from a careful analysis of the situatedness of the research interview
and not least possible situations or disruption provoked or made possible through the
interaction with place (Tanggaard, 2007; Roulston, 2010). Additionally, researchers
could pay attention to others who have experiences using places deliberately when
interviewing, for example, Pink (2008), who mentions the importance of sitting in a
chair with a cup of coffee in the home of a woman she is interviewing about her feeling
of belonging in the home. We encourage researchers to explore the difference between
not visiting the home and visiting the home. This would make it possible for researchers
to pay attention to the research-body and, more specifically, how she or he positions
her- or himself during an interview. Furthermore, researchers need to activate their
senses and learn how to be aware of sensory aspects, such as atmospheres, moods, and
feelings like fear, empathy, or excitement.

Analysis 3: place as a gathering

In the following section, we wish to illustrate how understanding a place as a gathering
can help the researcher deconstruct the place analytically and ask questions about the
different sensory, material, spatial, and social elements that constitute it. The following
is an extract of the authors’ fieldnotes:

‘Fuck, have you seen this? Grass has been growing down here,’ shouts Mads as we approach
the place under the bridge. There are a number of pallets and an old Swedish Häglöff sleeping
bag. ‘The couch is gone’, says one of them. They offer me a skateboard to sit on. It is a summer
day in August, the temperature is warm, but the betony bridge casts a shadow that makes the
place we sit feel cold. The Dictaphone rests between us in a cotton bag. The young men open
their bag of wine, which they drink slowly as the interview proceeds. From time to time, they
talk about fun episodes that they experienced at the place under the bridge. They point towards
the bridge and explain how they created the concert under the bridge and how they combined
light, visual media, sound and the architectonic characteristics of the bridge. We listen to cars
driving on top of the bridge. They explain how the sound of the cars camouflages the sound of
their concerts through a traffic soundscape. The sound of the cars also becomes an aural
background for the interview. (Fieldnotes, 16 August 2011)

As methodologists, we might ask ourselves what place is and how we can work with it
in interview situations. A discussion of how we understand place is essential in order to
go beyond the tendency to understand it as only a physical framing or tabula rasa—a
blank phenomenon (jf. Sin, 2003). Casey (1996: 24) approaches place as a gathering,
which, from our point of view, can contribute to a specific methodological approach:
‘Minimally, places gather things in their midst—where ‘things’ connote various animate
and inanimate entities. Places, also, gather experiences and histories, even languages and
604 Qualitative Research 22(4)

thoughts’. Casey understands places as lived, subtle dimensions of meaning, including

experiences, stories, languages, thoughts, and materiality. He uses the concept of gather-
ing as a way to understand how a place comes together through these multiple dimen-
sions, thus illustrating very specific elements of place.
Returning to the empirical material represented in this paper, materiality is an essen-
tial part of how research participants understand, value, and place their practices.
Understanding the importance of; the architecture of the bridge, the environment that
surrounds the bridge, and the materials the young people find and use when hanging out
under the bridge, are combined in the way they hang out under the bridge. The following
dialogue occurred during the interview:

Mads: ‘We just found this garbage to sit on.’

Troels: ‘Garbage and garbage. . .’ (insinuates that it isn’t garbage).

Mads: ‘Well okay. . . it is something we sit on.’ (Interview, 16 August 2011)

This short dialogue reveals how specific types of materiality are seen as meaningful
within the participants’ practices. They use what they find, and they redefine the function
of materiality within their social practices. Understanding place as a gathering is a way
for the researcher to describe the place and, through his or her sensory experience, to
attempt to understand the role and meaning the place has for the research participants.
The researcher can oneself following questions: What is important to the research par-
ticipants within this place? How do the research participants use the materiality in this
place? How does this place recall previous practices to the people interviewed? For
example, it helps the researcher to analytically understand how the stairs and path from
the bridge, the long grass, the cars above, the city moving at a distance, the shade, palls,
sofa, wine, nature, number of boys sharing space and time, how the self-organized young
people used social media to attract an audience to their concerts, and so forth, come
together as a gathering of their place.
We have illustrated the emplaced sensory experience of the research participants’ eve-
ryday place as well as the methodical deconstruction of the place as a gathering. Based
on the work of Casey, we now aim to illustrate how this provides an empirical basis for
generating and asking another type of question within the interview context. In order to
get a more detailed understanding of what place is, researchers need to train themselves
in obtaining an analytical optic for place, which can be done through thorough observa-
tions, as illustrated above, or by trying to understand the perspective of the research
participant and how she or he defines the place. Reflective interviewing (Roulston, 2010)
also means creating a place for discussions of potential analytical viewpoints on inter-
view interactions with fellow colleagues or participants in the field.

Analysis 4: asking emplaced questions

Spradley (1980: 156) argued: ‘If we ask for meaning, we will only discover the explicit
meanings, the ones people can talk about’. Moving beyond pre-constructed questions
Sand et al. 605

and asking questions in situ based on emplaced participation can offer insights into the
everyday practices of the studied phenomenon. As a researcher climbing down from the
bridge, sitting there together with young people, and listening to their stories and their
sensory experience brought the interviewer closer to the practices of the participants,
which made it possible to ask questions related to their specific ways of doing. Through
these emplaced experiences, the involved individuals are not just positioned as inform-
ants or interviewees whose voices are important but as participants in a shorter or longer
research process, which provides them with an opportunity to choose and emphasize the
emplaced, material, sensory, and social dimensions of their practice. Furthermore, this
approach to interviewing yields insights on sensory practices that cannot be obtained in
any other way.

Sand: ‘Why do you choose to meet at this place under the bridge?’

Matias: (He pauses, takes a deep breath and looks around) ‘Well, can’t you feel it?’

Sand: (Pause) ‘Well, there's something about this place. . .’

Sebastian ‘. . . it’s the feeling of being in the city but still away from it. We can hear the cars
summing up there (we all look at the bridge just above us); we know they're there, but nobody
notices us down here.’

Kristian adds: ‘Yes, the best thing here is the mood.’

Matias: ‘Up there (he points to the fundament of the bridge where the bands usually play), there
is something mind-blowing about this place. Since we started to come here, we just thought
about doing something down here. . . start something.’

(Interview, 16 August 2011)

The participants specifically mentioned that the place provided possibilities and
affordances that encouraged them, in their self-organized practices, to ‘do something. . .
start something’. Because the interview is actually occurring in a specific place, it is
methodologically possible to gain knowledge about its possibilities and how material,
sensory, and spatial dimensions are entangled in the act of organizing concerts. Being
there, under the bridge, makes it possible to ‘feel it’—together and through the sensory
experience, it is possible to obtain access to the emplacement of the people being studied
(jf. Pink, 2008). While there are differences between the intentions and perspectives of
the research participants and the researcher, being there makes it possible for the
researcher to see, sense, explore, and establish a dialogue about people studied and their
emplaced and sensory practices. Ingold (2000: 155) developed a perspective on move-
ment, senses, and the perception of the environment, arguing:

. . .people do not traverse the surface of a world whose layout is fixed in advance – as
represented on the cartographic map. Rather, they ‘feel their way’ through a world that is itself
in motion, continually coming into being through the combined action of human and non-
human agencies.
606 Qualitative Research 22(4)

Figure 2. The place of the interview. Photograph: Marcus Marcussen.

Figure 3. The research participants’ previous use of the place. Photograph: Marcus
Marcussen.

Ingold explains that we as researchers do not engage statically with the field but are in
motion in a field that itself in motion. For the researcher, this is a way to provide the
opportunity to study together (i.e. the cars passing by us on top of the bridge or our trying
to get closer to a common understanding of the atmosphere and feelings the place
provides).
Comparing the two photographs (Figures 2 and 3) illustrates how actually being there
provides an understanding of the young men’s self-organized practices and how different
types of materiality are a part of their social and emplaced practices. This stands in con-
trast to photo-elicited interviews, as it is not only a conversation about a previous event
but also provides an experienced understanding of their emplaced practices. Furthermore,
physically being there—sitting there together with the young people—produces ques-
tions and information that, in normal interview situations, are difficult for the research
Sand et al. 607

participants to articulate. For example, as a researcher sitting together with the young
people under the bridge made it possible for the researcher to ask questions related to the
young people’s everyday practices:

Sand: ‘What do you do when you are down here?’

Kristian: ‘We just hang out when we are here’ (the others nod).

Sand: ‘Can you explain to me what that means?’

Kristian: ‘That is what we are doing right now; sitting here, under the bridge, drinking, talking
about everything, joking with each other and listening to music.’

(Interview, 16 August 2011)

As argued by de Certeau (1984), some everyday practices can be difficult to explain or

understand from the outside, as they are deeply embedded in embodied ways of doing
and social relations that have been established over time. During the 3-year fieldwork,
the author found that the phenomenon of hanging out was difficult for the young people
to express through words, often resulting in statements such as ‘we are doing nothing’.
Being there together with them in a relaxed atmosphere made it possible to visualize the
phenomenon.
Michael (2004) focuses on how specific materialities can influence the interview
situation, reflecting upon emplaced dimensions after the interview has been carried
out. We argue that materiality can be explicitly related to everyday practices, and place
and materiality can bring forth new types of questions: for example, as seen in May
and Lewis (2020: 133), who showed that interviewing two ladies in their home made
the ladies talk about their experiences of balconies and how their enjoyment of the sun
was.
Inspired by Kvale (1997), in this study a semi-structured interview guide was con-
structed, and the questions were memorized. The interview guide provided a potential
thematic structure for the dialogue while allowing the researcher to ask questions in situ
and follow up on other themes as they took shape at the place. As illustrated above, the
researcher should transform his or her sensory experience into questions as the interview
is actually happening. The relationship between structured and situational questions
makes it worthwhile to reflect on how we as researchers can gain insights into practices
by adopting a more place-sensitive approach to interviewing and thus go beyond pre-
constructed knowledge. Being able to ask emplaced questions in interview situations
requires a curiosity toward practices and phenomenon one might take for granted—for
example, asking everyday questions about the ‘doing’ and ‘doing nothing’ of place. An
interview guide and prepared questions are needed when interviewing, but it is important
to leave space for asking questions in situ, which arise from the place and meeting itself.
This must be balanced with reflecting ethics situationally in order to construct an inter-
view situation which is comforting for the people interviewed (Tanggaard, 2006;
Brinkmann, 2013; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983).
608 Qualitative Research 22(4)

Further perspectives
As researchers, we must allow for greater sensitivity and reflectivity on the part of the
researcher in relation to the interview and its place. Many scholars in qualitative research
analyzing the research interview as a situated action has requested a greater sensitivity and
reflexivity (Roulston, 2010) and how place can be linked to the power dynamics of inter-
view practices (Tanggaard, 2013). Likewise, Gagnon et al. (2015) argue that thinking
about space and place in the context of interviewing is one way to engage in reflexivity.
Sin (2003) argues that an interview consists of a dialectic between the interview and
place. The consequence of this perspective is that it is too narrow to understand the mul-
tisensorial dimensions that constitute place when we understand it as a gathering (Casey,
1996). The presence of the researcher and research subject is simultaneously experienced
and constituted, and, hence, researchers must realize that they are part of place-making
practices, since they cannot disentangle themselves from the universality of place (Pink,
2008: 179). Pink (2009: 64) argues:

Understood through a theory of place, the idea of ethnographer participation implies that the
ethnographer is co-participating in practices through which place is constituted with those who
simultaneously participate in her or his research, and as such might become similarly emplaced.
Indeed, she or he becomes at the same time a constituent of place.

Following Pink’s argument of emplacement, we argue that activating senses when inter-
viewing and reflecting on where an interview takes place can be a methodological route
for getting closer to the different aspects of the social, cultural, or geographical phenom-
enon under study, which developments within qualitative research interviewing has
called for (Brinkmann and Kvale; 2015; Fontana and Prokos, 2007; Roulston, 2016).
More specifically, researchers’ focus on place can makes it possible to construct knowl-
edge that can be difficult to obtain through pre-constructed questions asked in a solely
verbal mode. The tendency to incorporate the meaning of place in interview situations is
dependent on the specific scientific field. Scientific fields such as geography, urban plan-
ning, and anthropology, for instance, have developed a tradition of thinking about place
and materiality, whereas psychology and sociology, in which several research interview
genres are rooted (Fontana and Prokos, 2007; Kvale, 1997), do not have the same tradi-
tion. Therefore, we argue that interviewing methods could benefit from more extensive
interdisciplinary reflection. Furthermore, reflections on place should be an indispensable
component of the qualitative methodological literature.
We are well aware that place might not always have the same level of importance as
the phenomenon studied in the examples illustrated in this paper. Therefore, we suggest
differentiating between studies that have a hard or soft articulation of place. A hard artic-
ulation of place means having place as an epistemological and analytical interest in the
study, where a soft articulation means that the focus of the interview is not primarily
related to place, but might deal with places as a subtheme. When understanding self-
organized practices in urban places, place is of epistemological interest to the researcher,
and, thus, an inherent and hard articulation of place is warranted. Studies in which place
is not specifically related to the epistemological aim should still consider how the
Sand et al. 609

influences the interview and how the researcher is part of constituting place in research
processes. As Sin (2003: 311) argues, a reflexive approach can be a very subjective pro-
cess in which reflexivity often occurs when it suits the researcher. We suggest reflexivity
through emplaced sensory participation, which will seriously consider how knowledge
about practice is comprehended methodologically, why and how the place of an inter-
view is chosen, what established understandings the researcher has about the place, and
how multisensory dimensions of the place can elicit questions about research partici-
pants everyday practices. In order to understand how researcher’s notion of place can
provide insights into everyday practices, we encourage scholars working in other empiri-
cal fields to examine how place and research interviews are related. Our ambition is to
create a nuanced research-based dialogue on what type of practice insights methodologi-
cal attention to the multisensory constitution of place can provide.

Conclusion
As shown in this paper, some studies on qualitative interviews acknowledge that place
has importance in knowledge construction (Fontana and Prokos, 2007; Kvale and
Brinkmann, 2015) but do not extensively give any suggestion as to how the researcher
might activate his or her own sensory emplaced participation methodologically. This
paper highlights a specific methodological vagueness related to reflecting where the
interview takes place and how this informs qualitative research interview practices.
Within the existing methodological, qualitative research interview literature that consid-
ers the notion of place seriously, we argue that emplaced participation can contribute to
the methodological development of qualitative interview approaches. The aim of the
paper has been to describe how the use of the concept of emplaced participation can
account for the multisensory constitution of place within interviews and how it can pro-
vide an opportunity for generating knowledge about the participants’ everyday practices.
Casey’s (1996) phenomenological understanding of place as a gathering and Pink’s
(2008, 2011) perspectives on emplaced participation provide a sensitive epistemological
approach that can be applied by researchers outside the field of ethnography, and recent
methodological reflections on the practice of research interviewing call for a likewise
sensitive reflection of the situatedness of interviewing (Tanggaard, 2007, 2008; Kvale
and Brinkmann, 2015; Roulston, 2010, 2014, 2016). Based on empirical ethnographic
material from a specific urban fieldwork in Denmark, this paper makes a novel contribu-
tion in addressing how researchers can use sensory and emplaced experience before and
during an interview and move beyond the tendency to understand interviews solely as a
verbally mediated dialogue between two or more people. We argue that, if we stop taking
emplaced dimensions for granted, new methodological techniques can be developed,
which can lead to new types of knowledge of practice. The present analysis emphasizes
that place should be part of the researcher’s methodological identity, and, along with
aspects such as how the research participants are chosen, the importance of place should
be taken into consideration. Moreover, this paper illustrates how the researcher can use
his or her sensing body in interview situations by activating a curiosity toward place and
by writing down fieldnotes before and during an interview. Understanding place as a
gathering provides a complex understanding of the concept, which can help describe
610 Qualitative Research 22(4)

what a place is and to whom. Through emplaced participation, the researcher can elicit
questions, asked in situ, that can be closely related to the research participants’ everyday
practices.

Disclosure
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Author biographies
Anne-Lene Sand has a PhD from the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern
Denmark. She has a background in educational anthropology and has studied self-organized urban
processes amongst young Danes for several years, with a special interest in spatial, material, sen-
sory, and temporal practices. She is currently working on a design-based research project involv-
ing play design and children’s participation at Design School Kolding.
Helle Marie Skovbjerg is a Professor of design for play at Design School Kolding. For several
years, Skovbjerg has been working with conceptualizing play through what she calls ‘the mood
perspective’. Skovbjerg has published several books and a number of journal papers within the
field of play research and design. Skovbjerg is currently the head of two larger research projects:
Can I Join In, about participation and play, and Playful Learning, about play within the education
of pedagogies and teachers’ education.
Lene Tanggaard has a PhD from Aalborg University, where she also holds a position as a professor
in educational psychology. She is the Rector at Design School Kolding. Tanggaard has published
extensively on topics such as the qualitative research interview, creativity, and learning. She is
currently working on a qualitative study of children’s learning in kindergarten.