Reading Between the Lines: Interpreting Silences in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Although speech is often the focus of qualitative research, what is not said may be as revealing as what is said, particularly since what is left out ordinarily far exceeds what is put in. The authors explore several potential interpretations of silence, beginning with a focus on silences embedded in interview transcripts, and how these are perceived and managed by researchers and participants. However, the limitations of interview tran scripts become apparent, and the need for a basis for understanding both silences and talk that is not limited to talk itself invites an examination of the role of context and, more specifically, the many structures of talk and interaction that can only be properly understood from an epistemological, theoretical, and methodological orientation that privileges neither structure nor agency, but the dense interpenetration of the two. Several consequences of such a perspective for the interpretation of silences are highlighted.