Analyzing Motives in Semi-Structured Interview Data: A Guide for the Social Sciences

By: Luis Antonio Vila-Henninger and Rosario Rizzo Lara

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Synopsis: This book advances the emerging work on using semi-structured interview data to analyze motives by providing the first book-length treatment of this underdeveloped methodological area in sociology and social science more broadly. Exploring key methodological and theoretical debates on this topic in-depth, the authors apply a dual-process model approach to demonstrate how we can analyze motives effectively in semi-structured interview data, and in tandem, understand the sociological reasoning behind society's moral judgments and political decision-making. Additionally, the authors develop the accessible and rigorous 5Rs methodology, which synthesizes insights from an array of literatures into a novel, cohesive analytic tool for analyzing motives in semi-structured interview data. Balancing transparency with theoretical nuance, it enables researchers to revisit and reuse previously collected data that may have been considered unsuitable for motive analysis, either because of prevailing disciplinary assumptions, or because of how data were initially framed and coded. Applicable to various cultural contexts and disciplines, the methodology explored in this book is thus of international interest to researchers and students of qualitative sociology, sociology of culture and cognition, migration studies, cognitive science, and moral psychology, with wider implications for qualitative methodologies in the social sciences.