How we constructed the future in the past: the use of temporal complexity and imagined futures in interviewees’ justifications for their actions

Determining why people did this or that in the past – their justifications for their actions – is a common goal of qualitative interviews. Yet interview methods have been criticised for taking participants’ accounts at face value, and for obscuring the collective nature of decision-making by focusing on the individual. This article argues that both limitations of account-seeking interviews stem, in part, from a lack of attention to the complex temporal terrain of justifications. Justifications do not only recount the past: interviewees point in many temporal directions, including giving accounts of imagined futures that they sought to bring into reality in the past. The article outlines and demonstrates an approach to transcript analysis informed by the sociology of conventions that is attentive to this temporal complexity, arguing that this approach deals with some of the criticisms levelled at interviews as a means of accessing why things have been done.