Collectively Committing to ‘What Is Interesting’ in Qualitative Research: A methodological application of interactional sociolinguistics

Although selecting aspects of empirical phenomena to investigate is of fundamental importance in qualitative research projects, we lack insight into how research teams navigate this challenge during the research process. In this paper, we address this lacuna by introducing an interactional sociolinguistic methodology to examine a series of real-life discussions by a qualitative research team over a three-year period. We identify four core types of commitments that are interactionally co-constructed: straightforward commitments, uncertain commitments, repeated commitments and withheld commitments. These enable research teams to maintain openness while narrowing their focus to ‘what is interesting' in the nexus of the observed field and academic discourse. Based on our findings, we present an interactional sociolinguistic model of collective commitments to ‘what is interesting' in qualitative research. Our work offers new insight into how research teams engage with complex methodological challenges and contributes to the methodological richness of qualitative organizational research by demonstrating how interactional sociolinguistics can be used to unpack the linguistic practices through which shared direction emerges in team-based organizing.