Qualitative Inquiry 1–12 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077800414566686 qix.sagepub.com Article Research participants are not “cultural dopes” (Giddens, 1979, p. 71)—rather, “they can give cogent reasons for their intentions and actions, and generally demonstrate a sophis- ticated (although not necessarily social scientific) under- standing of the situations they inhabit” (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000, p. 573). Unfortunately, all too often in our interview practices, we are so busy listening for under- standing, we gloss over situations in which participants rec- ognize, reflect on, and sometimes create spaces for change in their own viewpoints. This project began with our interest in instances of par- ticipants’ self-reflexivity and self-interrogation across sev- eral research studies. While conducting interviews, we became fascinated by occasions where participants engaged in spontaneous self-reflexivity about their responses, some- times going so far as to rethink or revise espoused beliefs and opinions, even after an initial certainty or steadfastness. For example, one young boy, after suggesting he would never want to be a full-time homemaker, suddenly realized that perhaps his future wife may also want to avoid this fate. With this interest in mind, we returned to our interview transcripts to explicitly identify these moments of self- reflexivity and transformation. It is our belief that such occurrences demand attention, not only in their potential for understanding transformation but also for the richness available when participants explicitly work through their own process of sensemaking. We, like many qualitative scholars, approach our craft with a basic assumption of reality as a communicative con- struction (e.g., Holstein & Gubrium, 1997; Kvale, 1996; Lindlof & Taylor, 2002; Tracy, 2013). That said, it seems all too often this social constructionist ontology is lost in the actual practice of conducting research. Hyde and Bineham (2000) explain, while many of us understand [social constructionist] theory, far fewer of us live it . . . We spend much of our lives struggling with the way things “are,” rather than savoring the malleability that a constitutive view of language, fully distinguished, might lend our world. (p. 214) The widely accepted practice of interviewing as a method for empirical research is often treated as a reporting process where the truth is “out there” to be discovered, rather than a “transform[ation of] information into shared experience” (Denzin, 2001, p. 24). From a communication transmission model (e.g., Corman, Trethewey, & Goodall, 566686QIX XX X 10.1177/1077800414566686Qualitative InquiryWay et al. research-article 2015 1 Villanova University, PA, USA 2 Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA Corresponding Author: Amy K. Way, Department of Communication, Villanova University, 800 Lancaster Ave., Villanova, PA 19085, USA. Email: amy.way@villanova.edu Dialogic Interviewing and Flickers of Transformation: An Examination and Delineation of Interactional Strategies That Promote Participant Self-Reflexivity Amy K. Way 1 , Robin Kanak Zwier 1 , and Sarah J. Tracy 2 Abstract This article identifies practices in qualitative interviews that evoke research participant reflexivity and change. By engaging interviews in a dialogic manner, researchers can encourage participant perspective-taking and non-judgmental involvement that can lead to flickers of transformation. The study draws on empirical material from three different projects to locate critical incidents of dialogic interviewing. We propose a typology of dialogic interviewing strategies that accompany reflexivity—namely, (a) probing questions, (b) member reflections, and (c) counterfactual prompting. These strategies illustrate the transformative power of dialogic interviewing and serve as a guide for researchers who desire their interviews to not only be methods for gathering knowledge but also methods for intervention and critical reflection. Keywords dialogue, interviewing, qualitative methodology, reflexivity, transformation at VILLANOVA UNIV on February 25, 2015 qix.sagepub.com Downloaded from