ABSTRACT
Any interviewer who has attempted to ask people what meaning they attribute to spaces will probably have had the sort of experience we have had in a number of research projects: People are virtually incapable of giving information about spaces when asked to do so. From a methodological perspective, the question emerges how spaces arising in communicative action can be investigated when speaking about space presents a problem to many laypersons. In this article, we present two methods for eliciting space: talking and drawing. We begin in the first section with secondary analyses of interviews in order to give an example of how productively incidental spatial narratives in interviews dealing with other issues can be interpreted for spatial analysis. Following on from this, we show how helpful implicitly or explicitly communicated knowledge about places and regions in (focus) group discussions is for the comprehension of the significance of actions and spaces. In the second section, we place the focus on mapping procedures, particularly the productive interrelation of the graphic and the spoken or written. We see drawings as a chance, in the process of visualization, to loosen up the blockages in speaking about space.
