Interviews as a Means of Exploring Risk Lifeworlds: Excavating the Roots of Everyday Meanings, Experiences and Practices

Interpretations and expectations regarding uncertain futures are rooted in taken-for-granted understandings. In this chapter we consider how to dig deeper into these implicit meaning-making processes—or lifeworlds—through careful design, collection, and analysis of interview data. Drawing on Schützian phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and recent debates around interviewing, we explore how selecting pertinent cases, being attentive to power dynamics within interviews, using multiple interviews over time, triangulating interviews with observations, and combining these approaches can be used to grasp the depths of interpretations and meanings. We consider how these techniques have enabled new insights into the system assumptions underlying trust, the texture of lifeworlds shaped by psychosis, the gendered assumptions of professional decision-making, and how drug users rework their future horizons in the face of diverse risks.