ABSTRACT
In 1971, and based on work originally begun at Stanford University in 1955, an interdisciplinary group of social scientists (McQuown, Bateson, Birdwhistell, Brosen, & Hockett, 1971) completed a massive study of a single interview titled "The Natural History of an Interview." Each member of the team had been given a copy of the 16-mm film on which the interview had been captured and each analyzed it according to their own particular point of view. The completed manuscript from the project ran more than 700 pages. Although it is available on University of Chicago microfilm, the study was never published, in part, because like blind men describing an elephant, there was little overall cohesiveness to the analysis and little agreement on what it all meant.
