The Ethnographic Interview

The book is a twelve-step sequence for doing ethnography. Step Four, asking descriptive questions, is the part a manager can use unchanged.

• The grand tour question is engineered to make someone ramble. “Grand tour questions encourage informants to ramble on and on. There are four different types which vary the way such questions are asked” [1]. Spradley’s own version, asked of a man who had been in the Seattle City Jail: could you describe the inside of the jail for me.
• A grand tour is not only about a place. “Whether the ethnographer uses space, time, events, people, activities, or objects, the end result is the same: a verbal description of significant features of the cultural scene” [1]. A working week, a deal cycle and a set of tools are all territories you can ask someone to walk you through.
• The four grand-tour forms are different instruments. The typical form “asks for a description of how things usually are” [1]; the specific form “takes the most recent day, the most recent series of events, or the locale best known to the informant” [1]. The guided form asks to be shown around; the task-related form asks the person to walk you through doing something. Which form you reach for is a fact about the person, not the topic. “Some informants find it difficult to generalize to the typical but can easily describe a recent situation” [1]. When someone gives you a vague answer about how things usually go, the move is not to press — it is to switch forms and ask about yesterday.
• Ask the question long, not short. “Expanding descriptive questions not only gives informants time to think, but it says” — tell me as much as you can, in great detail [2]. Repeating and elaborating a question is not padding; it is what buys the specifics.
• The descriptive family is larger than the grand tour. Spradley’s Figure 4.1 runs grand tour, mini-tour, example, experience and “native-language questions” [2] — the last being how you get the vocabulary of the world rather than your own words for it.

• You are planning what to ask on a Calibration Call. Without this book you write a list of questions about the role. Spradley gives you question forms, which is what lets you follow an answer instead of moving to the next item.
• The expert is answering in generalities and you are running out of call. This is the exact case the typical-versus-specific distinction was built for. Stop asking what a great VP of Sales does and ask what they did yesterday, from arriving to leaving.
• You want the words the role actually uses, not your words for it. Native-language questions are the part of the taxonomy people skip, and they are how you stop importing your own vocabulary into a job you have never done.