I really liked what Luker had to say about interviews in her chapter on field methods. After all our talk of things like bias and the halo effect, I was beginning to have a lot of questions about the value of the interview as a research method. Luker points out that interviews are often criticized because they aren't a "realistic" account of any aspect of social life, as well as because interviews are narratives and so they are always an interpretation of what happened, rather than what actually happened. I couldn't let go of the idea of interviews as a valuable research method (I like narratives), but it became clear really quickly that learning how to make sense of them was going to be more complicated than I anticipated. But Luker writes that the value of interviews isn't that they're an accurate picture of reality, but that they are "accurate accounts of the kinds of mental maps that people carry around inside their heads, and that it is this, rather than some videotape of 'reality' which is of interest to us" (167). I like this. I think it's valuable, in sociological research, to pay attention to what and how people think, and how they interpret their reality, as much as it is valuable to try and create a picture of the "reality" itself, and I'm glad to be able to frame the practice of interviewing in this way.