Silence in Qualitative Interviewing

Silence in qualitative interviewing has been largely neglected within the social sciences. Data generation, which focuses on spoken words in dialogues, tends to conceive silences as disruptive, problematic, and analytically redundant. Therefore, interviews containing a lot of silence are often categorised as “failed” and dismissed for not providing enough useful data for qualitative analyses. However, qualitative interviews logically consist of both spoken words and silences, and the silences form the conversations just as effectively as the spoken words. Whether silences are short and subtle or prolonged and distinct, they are never meaningless or neutral but always important and dynamic components of an interview. This entry shows how silence can be successfully incorporated in qualitative analysis.