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

Selecting which aspects of empirical phenomena to investigate is a fundamental yet underexplored challenge in qualitative research. This paper introduces an interactional sociolinguistic methodology to examine how a qualitative research team navigated this challenge during a three-year project. By analysing real-life team discussions, we identify four types of interactionally co-constructed commitments – straightforward, uncertain, repeated and withheld commitments – that enable teams to balance exploratory openness with the need to narrow their focus within the interplay between the observed empirical field and academic discourse. Building on these insights, we propose an interactional sociolinguistic model of collective commitments to ‘what is interesting’ in qualitative research. Our study contributes to methodological scholarship by revealing how linguistic interaction shapes shared direction and methodological decision-making in team-based qualitative inquiries.