Interviews of Theatre Critics 2004-2009

The study investigated the views of Finnish theatre critics on the nature and main goals of theatre reviews, changes in reviewing over time, relations between theatre artists and critics, the significance of taste, differences between art forms in terms of reviewing, the ethics of criticism, and theatre reviews as a text form. There were also questions on the participants' own background and how they became critics. In the interview schema, the researcher had combined the questions to be asked with the theoretical concepts presented by Pierre Bourdieu. The data consist of 15 interview transcripts, two of which are in Swedish and the rest in Finnish. Most interviews were face-to-face but two persons were interviewed by e-mail. Background information included the interviewee's gender and year of birth as well interview date and anonymised interview location. The dataset is only available in Finnish, with the exception of two interview transcripts available in Swedish.