Isenring, Barbara (2010) The Role of Response tokens in a Qualitative Research Interview. Honours thesis, University of Southern Queensland. (Unpublished)
Abstract
The subject of this thesis is the role of brief listener responses, categorised by Gardner (2001) as response tokens, in a qualitative research interview setting. It is argued that traditional interviewing conventions should be examined for empirical evidence as to the validity of their guidelines. Previous research has shown that interviewers do not always adhere to the recommended set question and answer format but use the discourse resources innate in everyday conversation. Discourse resources are naturally occurring rules inherent in conversation to achieve orderly talk. The aims of this thesis were to identify what discourse resources interviewers are used in a qualitative research interview and, secondly, to investigate the form, location and function of response tokens and the role they played in the trajectory of a qualitative research interview. The data for this analysis was taken from a semi-structured interview, conducted by Margaret Wetherell in New Zealand, in the mid-1980s. Conversation analysis was used to examine the data segment and the findings showed that the data conformed to the three major discourse resources of turn-taking, adjacency pairs and response tokens. The results of the analysis identified four categories of response tokens. Three of these were used by the interviewer: continuers, indicating non-uptake of an opportunity to talk; acknowledgement tokens, which claim agreement or understanding of the prior turn; and newsmarkers which mark the prior speaker’s turn as newsworthy and are used as ideaconnectors. The fourth category, the hesitation marker, was used by both interviewer and respondent as a turn-holding device. A limitation of this study is that because it was restricted to one data set, the findings cannot be generalised to other interviewing situations and more research needs to be done. The implications of our findings are that discourse resources such as response tokens should be an integral part of the interviewing process. Our findings suggest that a collaborative approach to qualitative interviewing should be adopted rather than the traditional format of set questions and answers which restricts the valuable discourse resources of everyday conversation. It is further suggested that the principles of conversation analysis should be incorporated as part of the curriculum for all psychology courses.
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| Item Type: | Thesis (Non-Research) (Honours) |
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| Item Status: | Live Archive |
| Additional Information: | Current UniSQ staff and students can request access to this thesis. Please email research.repository@unisq.edu.au with a subject line of SEAR thesis request and provide: Name of the thesis requested and Your name and UniSQ email address |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Historic - Faculty of Sciences - Department of Psychology (Up to 30 Jun 2013) |
| Supervisors: | Christensen, Steven |
| Qualification: | Bachelor of Science (Honours) (Psychology) |
| Date Deposited: | 08 Jan 2026 03:15 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Jan 2026 03:15 |
| Fields of Research (2008): | 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 1799 Other Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 179999 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences not elsewhere classified |
| Fields of Research (2020): | 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5299 Other psychology > 529999 Other psychology not elsewhere classified |
| URI: | https://sear.unisq.edu.au/id/eprint/52437 |
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