Järvinen / MEANING IN QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS The Biographical Illusion: Constructing Meaning in Qualitative Interviews

This article deals with qualitative interviews in a research project on alcohol abusers and with some of the negotiations—about the cause and effect, guilt, and responsibility— involved in these interviews. The aim of this article is to show that interviews are sites of knowledge production and that interviewees fashion their stories according to more or less distinct interpretive frameworks. To illustrate the processes of assigning competence to interviewees, three unsuccessful narratives are presented. One thesis of the article is that the assignment of competence to interviewees reflects the degree of correspondence between the narrator’s interpretive framework and the theoretical preunderstanding of the researcher. This article deals with qualitative interviews in a research project on alco-hol abusers and with some of the negotiations—about the cause and effect, guilt, and responsibility—involved in these interviews. The empirical data come from a project on socially marginalized alcoholics in Copenhagen, where a total of 54 abusers were interviewed about their current and previous living conditions, their views of alcohol usage and abuse, and their experi-ences of treatment and care.1 The sociopolitical starting point for the study was the thesis that socially marginalized abusers are increasingly being refused admittance to professional treatment institutions and referred to low-budget hostels or left totally without help.2 In this article, a small number of interviews from the project will be analyzed to describe some of the mean-ing-interpreting and meaning-creating processes lying behind the alcoholics’ narratives. This article is inspired by the broad range of constructivist approaches3 characterizing the literature on qualitative methodology in the 1980s an