By David Schneer
11-Minute Read
In some qualitative research training circles, a curious orthodoxy has taken root: asking respondents “why?” is supposedly too direct, too interrogatory, too likely to trigger discomfort or defensiveness. Softer alternatives—“Tell me more” or “Can you elaborate?”—are prescribed instead. I think that’s nonsense. Let me explain why (pun absolutely intended).
A Short Etymology (Or: We’ve Been Asking Why Since the Bronze Age)
“Why” descends from Old English hwī, the instrumental case of hwæt—the ancestor of our modern “what.” Trace it further back, and you land in Proto-Germanic hwī and ultimately in the Proto-Indo-European interrogative root kʷo-, which also produced Latin qui and quis, Greek tís, and Sanskrit kaḥ (Harper, 2001–2024).
Humans have been asking why for roughly as long as we’ve been asking anything at all.
It is arguably our most economical question word: one syllable, three letters, one puff of air—and you have just invited another person to, as is said, “spill their guts.”
Anyone who has spent an afternoon with a three-year-old knows asking why is devastatingly effective. Developmental psychologists call the relentless interrogations young children inflict upon their parents the “why phase.” They are not taught this behavior. Chouinard (2007) found that preschoolers ask a mind-numbingly 70 to 100 questions an hour, many of them why-questions aimed at causal explanation. Frazier, Gelman, and Wellman (2009) showed that children are genuinely dissatisfied with evasive answers and will re-ask until the adult coughs up actual causation. They do not say, “Mommy, could you please elaborate?” Rather, they batter you with “why?”
A Higher Power
For those of you who want to appeal to a Higher Power, the following is what Scripture has to say about the subject. A search of the New American Standard Bible (NASB) yields 392 occurrences across two forms—capitalized Why (288) and a lower case why (104). Hits per 1,000 words spike hardest in 2 Samuel, Job, Psalms, Jeremiah, and the Gospels—the books of grief, lament, and anguished cries for explanation, as recorded in the Book of Mark.
“My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Mark 15:34, NASB) is not a softened elaboration request. It is the rawest possible why. Had the author recorded, “Tell me more about your current evasiveness,” the canon would be considerably less moving. In both forms, the word does in Scripture what it does in a focus group: it presses past surface into cause.
St. Paul the Ethnographer, Rome the Pollster
Scripture also supplies two of the earliest recognizable research methods in Western theological canon. As I argue in Backbone: Surviving the Road Less Quantified; Toward a Deeper Understanding of Qualitative Research (Schneer, 2024), the Apostle Paul’s stay in Athens resembles proto-ethnography. Before his speech at the Areopagus, he walked the streets, observed the altars, and dialogued with passersby—the Greek dialegomai implying a true two-way exchange (Acts 17). Biblical scholar F. F. Bruce notes Paul “debated day by day with those who happened to be around” in the Agora, absorbing the local color and atmosphere of the city. Engagement, observation, dialogue—qualitative fieldwork two millennia before Spradley (1979) labeled it. Paul did his homework.
The quantitative tradition also appears in the same canon. The word census appears seventeen times in Scripture—used to count congregants, families, military strength, and, under Rome, taxpayers (Luke 2:1–3). By 6 CE, Caesar’s census was the machinery behind a tribute that exceeded forty percent of a Jewish peasant’s annual income (Schneer, 2024).
That’s right. Your high taxes are nothing new. Between Paul’s street-level ethnography and Rome’s bean counting, the two hemispheres of modern research already had working prototypes. And Paul, notably, kept asking why.
The Argument
Let’s take a Point-Counterpoint approach to spotlight both sides of the argument.
Point: “Why” Is Confrontational
Proponents argue that “why” puts respondents on the spot and invites post-hoc rationalization. In clinical contexts, the caution has warrant—Rogers and the motivational interviewing literature note that “why” questions can imply judgment.
Counterpoint: Tone Trumps Vocabulary
Discomfort doesn’t live inside a word. It lives in delivery, environment, and rapport. A moderator asking, “why do you say that?” in a soft, curious, neutral tone is having a conversation—not an interrogation. The same words barked by a hostile attorney feel entirely different. You don’t blame the hammer for the carpenter.
Your friends at dinner don’t say, “Could you elaborate on your preference for the pinot?” They say, “Why that one?”Conversational authenticity reduces defensiveness. Kipling ranks “Why” second among the question words more than a century ago: “Their names are What and Why and When / And How and Where and Who” (Kipling, 1902). Coincidence? Not likely.
Point: The Evidence Is Thin
To be fair, the broader peer-reviewed literature on questions in interview-based settings is real and respectable. Williams (2023) reviews the immediate effects of question types in psychotherapy. Thompson, Howes, and McCabe (2016) coded 134 outpatient psychiatric consultations and found that “wh-” questions yielded poorer results. Renger (2023) interviewed person-centered therapists about how and why they ask questions despite their tradition’s official ambivalence about them.
In another camp, the motivational interviewing tradition has its own sizable evidence base (Hettema, Steele, and Miller, 2005), and Hermans’s self-confrontation method, built on a structured sequence of open questions, has been peer-reviewed and refined over decades (Hermans, 1990; Lyddon and Yowell, 2006). Developmental and forensic psychologists have studied “Why” and “How Come” questions in children specifically (Wylie, Stolzenberg, and Evans, 2021; Ronfard, Zambrana, Hermansen, and Kelemen, 2018).
That all sounds promising—until you ask the actual question at hand. None of this work isolates the word why, in adult qualitative interviewing, against the prescribed alternatives (“tell me more,” “can you elaborate,” “help me understand”) to test whether why specifically degrades data quality, increases defensiveness, or yields more post-hoc rationalization. Thompson and colleagues come closest, and even there, why is folded into a “wh-” bucket alongside what, when, where, and who. The developmental studies are about whether seven-year-olds can answer why accurately—not whether adults in a focus group land softer when asked, “tell me more.” The motivational interviewing cautions against why lives in the textbook tradition (Miller and Rollnick, 2013), not in a controlled trial isolating the word.
In short, the macro views show that questions matter and that form matters; the micro—does the single word why damage qualitative interviews relative to softer probes?—has not been tested in any peer-reviewed work I can find. The “don’t ask why” rule shows up in training manuals, practitioner blogs, and books like STOP Wasting Words (Eisenberg and Mahar, 2019), which I genuinely like and recommend except for its stance on why. If “why” truly damaged data quality, we’d see controlled studies demonstrating it. We don’t. Socrates’s elenchus was a relentless chain of why-questions (Plato, c. 399 BCE/1892). If the word were truly corrosive to sincere disclosure, The Apology would be a much shorter dialogue.
Counterpoint: Comfort Is Everything
Numerous studies show that respondents simply need to feel safe before any probe lands well—and I agree with that version entirely. In BACKBONE, I tell the story of two gas stations sitting catacorner—one dim but cheap, the other bright and pricier. People consistently gravitated to the bright one. Comfort and perceived safety win (Schneer, 2024). The same principle applies in a focus group room. When respondents feel welcomed—warm introduction, relaxed posture, genuine curiosity from the moderator—“why” becomes an invitation, not an attack. Strip the rapport away, and every probe feels intrusive, including “tell me more.” The discipline is in the delivery, not in the word
My Take
The anti-why rule confuses symptom with cause. Practitioners who get defensive reactions blame the word when the real culprit could be a “cold” room, a rushed moderator, or a respondent who never felt heard. “Why” is not the problem. Bad delivery is.
You can use “tell me more.” Or “can you elaborate?” Or even, “help me understand.” But don’t kill “why.” It is the most natural, human probe we have, and when delivered with warmth, it unlocks the very depths qualitative research exists to capture. From St. Paul to a three-year-old in the back seat, the word has done the same essential work for millennia.
So: to why, or not to why? Why, of course. Just ask it kindly.
If the right question can open the right door, what might it unlock for your business? If your organization has questions worth answering, assumptions worth testing, or decisions that deserve more than guesswork, ask them kindly and ask them well. The team at Merrill Research knows how to get past surface-level responses and uncover what people truly think, feel, and do. https://merrillresearch.com/contact/
References
Chouinard, M. M. 2007. “Children’s Questions: A Mechanism for Cognitive Development.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 72, no. 1: 1–112.
Eisenberg, S., and S. E. Mahar. 2019. STOP Wasting Words: Leading with Conscious Communications, 110–12. Charleston, SC: Advantage Media.
Frazier, Brandy N., Susan A. Gelman, and Henry M. Wellman. 2009. “Preschoolers’ Search for Explanatory Information within Adult–Child Conversation.” Child Development 80, no. 6: 1592–1611.
Harper, Douglas. 2001–2024. “Why.” Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/why.
Hermans, Hubert J. M. 1990. “Self-Confrontation as a Method for Assessment and Intervention in Counseling.” Journal of Counseling & Development 69, no. 2: 156–162.
Hettema, Jennifer, Julie Steele, and William R. Miller. 2005. “Motivational Interviewing.” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 1: 91–111.
Kipling, Rudyard. 1902. “The Elephant’s Child.” In Just So Stories for Little Children. London: Macmillan.
Kvale, Steinar, and Svend Brinkmann. 2009. InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Lyddon, William J., and Darrell R. Yowell. 2006. “The Self-Confrontation Method: Theory, Research, and Practical Utility.” Counselling Psychology Quarterly 19, no. 1: 27–43.
Miller, William R., and Stephen Rollnick. 2013. Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press.
New American Standard Bible. 1995. Updated ed. 2020. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation.
Plato. (ca. 399 BCE) 1892. “Apology.” Translated by Benjamin Jowett. In The Dialogues of Plato, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Renger, Suzanne. 2023. “Therapists’ Views on the Use of Questions in Person-Centred Therapy.” British Journal of Guidance & Counselling 51, no. 2: 238–250.
Rogers, Carl R. 1961. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Ronfard, Samuel, Imac M. Zambrana, Tone K. Hermansen, and Deborah Kelemen. 2018. “Question-Asking in Childhood: A Review of the Literature and a Framework for Understanding Its Development.” Developmental Review 49: 101–120.
Schneer, David M. 2024. Backbone: Surviving the Road Less Quantified — Toward a Deeper Understanding of Qualitative Research.
Spradley, James P. 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Thompson, Laura, Christine Howes, and Rose McCabe. 2016. “Effect of Questions Used by Psychiatrists on Therapeutic Alliance and Adherence.” British Journal of Psychiatry 209, no. 1: 40–47.
Williams, Elizabeth Nutt. 2023. “The Use of Questions in Psychotherapy: A Review of Research on Immediate Outcomes.” Psychotherapy 60, no. 3: 246–254.
Wylie, Breanne E., Stacia N. Stolzenberg, and Angela D. Evans. 2021. “Children’s Accuracy in Answering Why and How Come Questions.” International Journal of Behavioral Development 45, no. 5: 423–428.