Exploring disagreement: Using video-based interviews to understand a communal resource

Abstract

Disagreement is a fundamental dimension of social life. In many situations, however, people are reticent to explicitly criticise the actions of others. It follows that if social researchers wish to study differences in people's common sense judgements of other's actions in an interview setting they need to carefully design how discussion of these differences are structured. This paper examines a research project that used context-specific video clips to structure interviews with users of a communal infrastructural resource. In digging into the practical detail of an interview encounter, the paper contributes to human geography's ongoing conversation about the practicalities of doing interview-based research.