Adorno interpreted interview subjects he never met, maintaining strict detachment from his research object.

Evidence

64 Adorno, who was attempting to exploit the richness and concreteness of the live' interviews through this phenomenological procedure, had not personally taken part in any of the interviews. The persons he was attempting to use, as if under a microscrope, to elucidate the connection between ideology and personality structure were completely foreign to him, and so was the environment they lived in. As with the study on fascist agitators and other earlier empirical inquiries the Institute had undertaken, detachment from the object’ of the research was maintained, and the division of labour was rigidly observed. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 440

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Institute’s earlier fascist-agitator study and its habitual separation of theorist from empirical material. — connects to: Adorno deliberately kept his spoken improvisations separate from his printed work — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 46; Adorno rejected empirical research criticism despite its validity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1012; Adorno defended empirical fieldwork while never giving the Institute a rigorous research direction. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 474 (+4 more)
• QUESTION: How much did this detachment condition the content of the qualitative portraits — worth checking against the published interview analyses?
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Adorno deliberately kept his spoken improvisations separate from his printed work — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 46; Adorno rejected empirical research criticism despite its validity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1012; Adorno defended empirical fieldwork while never giving the Institute a rigorous research direction. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 474 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno abandoned decisive involvement in the Institute’s empirical projects after the group study #complicates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 520
• Adorno defended empirical fieldwork while never giving the Institute a rigorous research direction. #complicates (0.74) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 474