78 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
in what is being said, and purpose in moving forward. Sometimes an
important question will start out as an ill-defined instinct or hunch, which
takes time to develop and seems risky to ask. Sometimes the effective
question reflects the interviewer's own groping for coherence about what
is being said and is asked in a hesitant, unsure manner.
Effective questioning is so context-bound, such a reflection of the
relationship that has developed between the interviewer and the partici-
pant, that to define it further runs the risk of making a human process
mechanical. To some extent, the way interviewers are as people will be
the way they are as interviewers. If interviewers are the sort of people who
always have to be talking, who never listen, who demand to be the center
of attention most of the time, who are really not interested in other peo-
ple's stories, no matter what procedures they follow in interviewing, those
characteristics will probably pervade the interviewing relationship.
The most important personal characteristic interviewers must have is
a genuine interest in other people. They must be deeply aware that other
people's stories are of worth in and of themselves and because they offer
something to the interviewer's experience. With a temperament that finds
interest in others, a person has the foundation upon which to learn the
techniques of interviewing and to practice its skills.
Interviewing as a Relationship
Interviewing is both a research methodology and a social relationship that
must be nurtured, sustained, and then ended gracefully (Dexter, 1970;
Hyman et al., 1954; Mishler, 1986). In part, each interviewing relation-
ship is individually crafted. It is a reflection of the personalities of the
participant and the interviewer and the ways they interact. The relation-
ship is also a reflection of the purpose, structure, and method of in-depth
interviewing. For example, the fact that the participant and the inter-
viewer meet three times over 2 or 3 weeks results in a relationship different
from that which would result from a single-interview structure.
Interviewers can try to craft relationships with their participants that
are like islands of interchange separate from the world's definitions, classi-
fications, and tensions. However, individual interviewing relationships
exist in a social context. Although an interviewer might attempt to isolate
the interviewing relationship from that context and make it unique to the
interviewer and the participant, the social forces of class, ethnicity, race,
and gender, as well as other social identities, impose themselves. Although
interviewers may try to ignore these social forces, they tend to affect their
relationships with participants nonetheless.
INTERVIEWINGAS AN "I-THOU" RELATIONSHIP
In a section of his book that is elegant even in translation, Schutz
(1967)explains that one person's intersubjective understanding of another
depends upon creating an "I-Thou" relationship, a concept bearing both
similarities to and significant differences from the philosopher Martin
Buber's use of the phrase. "Thou" is someone close to the interviewer, still

80 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
separate, but a fellow person. We recognize "Thou," according to Schutz,
as another "alive and conscioushuman being" (p: 164).Implicit in such an
"I-Thou" relationship is a shift from the interviewer's seeing the partici-
pant as an object or a type, which he or she would normally describe
syntactically in the third person. Schutz goes on to say that a relationship
in which each person is "Thou" oriented- that is, in which the sense of
"Thou-ness" is mutual -becomes a "We" relationship.
The interviewer's goal is to transform his or her relationship with the
participant into an "I-Thou" relationship that verges on a "We" relation-
ship. In the approach to interviewing I have been discussing, the inter-
viewer does not strive for a full "We" relationship. In such a case the
interviewer would become an equal participant, and the resulting dis-
course would be a conversation, not an interview. In an "I-Thou" rela-
tionship, however, the interviewer keeps enough distance to allow the
participant to fashion his or her responses as independently as possible.
In some approaches to participatory research, however, the icter-
viewers do attempt to create a full "We" relationship (Griffin, 1989; Rea-
son, 1994). Oakley (1981) argues that not doing so is manipulative and
reflects a male, hierarchical model of research. I try to strike a balance,
saying enough about myself to be alive and responsivebut little enough to
preserve the autonomy of the participant's words and to keep the focus of
attention on his or her experience rather than mine.
RAPPORT
That balancing act is central to developing an appropriate rapport
with the participant. I have never been completely comfortable with the
common assumption that the more rapport the interviewer can establish
with the participant, the better. Rapport implies getting along with each
other, a harmony with, a conformity to, an affinityfor one another. The
problem is that, carried to an extreme, the desireto build rapport with the
participant can transform the interviewing relationship into a full "We"
relationship in which the question of whose experience is being related
and whose meaning is being made is critically confounded.
In our community college study, one participant invited my wife and
me to his house for dinner after the second interview and before the third.
I had never had such an invitation from a participant in the study, and I
did not quite know what to do. I did not want to appear ungracious, so we
accepted. My wife and I went to dinner at his home. We had a wonderful
California backyard cookout, and it was a pleasure to spend time with the
participant and his family. But a few days later, when I met him at his
INTERVIEWING AS A RELATIONSHIP 81
faculty officefor the third interview, he was so warm and familiar toward
me that I could not retain the distance I needed to explore his responses. I
felt tentative as an interviewer because I did not want to risk violating the
spirit of hospitality that he had created by inviting us to his home.
The rapport an interviewer must build in an interviewing relationship
needs to be controlled. Too much or too little rapport can lead to distor-
tion of what the participant reconstructs in the interview (Hyman et al.,
1954). For the sake of establishing rapport, for example, interviewers
sometimes share their own experience when they think it is relevant to the
participant's. Although such sharing may contribute to building rapport,
it can also affect and even distort what the participant might have said
had the interviewer not shared his or her experience. The interviewing
relationship must be marked by respect, interest, attention, and good
manners on the part of the interviewer. The interviewer must be con-
stantly alert to what is appropriate to the situation. As in teaching, the
interviewing relationship can be friendly but not a friendship. (See
Oakley, 1981, for a contrasting perspective.)
At the beginning of an interviewing relationship, I recommend erring
on the side of formality rather than familiarity. (See also Hyman et al.,
1954.)For example, an early step in an interviewing relationship is to ask
if the participant minds being called by his or her first name. To do so
without asking presumes familiarity, which can be off-putting, especially
to older people. Common courtesies such as holding a door, not sitting
until the person is seated, and introducing yourself again so that you make
sure the participant knows to whom he or she is talking are small steps.
But they all add up to expressing respect for the participant, which is
central to the interview process.
Once the interview is under way, and as the participant begins to
share his or her life history and details of present experience, it is crucial
for the interviewer to maintain a delicate balance between respecting
what the participant is saying and taking advantage of opportunities to
ask difficult questions, to go more deeply into controversial subjects. In
our seminar on In-Depth Interviewing and Issues in Qualitative Research,
for example, one interviewer said that a participant had made remarks
that reflected what the interviewer thought to be racist attitudes. At the
time, which was early in her pilot project, the interviewer did not feel
comfortable in following up on that aspect of what the participant had
said. She hadn't yet developed a technique for exploring such a difficult
subject without appearingjudgmental. However, by not following up, she
later realized that she was left with material which, if used, might be
unfair to the participant. She decided that she could not use the material.
In future interviews she would find a tactful way to encourage her partici-

82 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
pants to explore their own words further when she perceived ambiguity in
their narrative.
Another reason to control the rapport an interviewer builds in an
interviewing relationship is that when the interviews are concluded, the
interviewing relationship shifts dramatically. It becomes more distant,
less intimate, focusing on what happens to the material generated by the
interview. Issues of ownership of the material can easily arise. Interview-
ers should agree to give a copy of the transcripts or audiotapes to the
participant, who has a basic right to these. The participant may want to
review the transcripts to see if there is any part with which he or she might
not be comfortable and wish to have excluded from the study. This stage
of the relationship is likely to be conducted by phone, letter, or e-mail.
The rapport an interviewer builds during the interview must be consistent
with the relationship the interviewer expects to have with the participant
after the interviews are concluded. (See Griffin, 1989, for a model of an
active, ongoing relationship between interviewers and participants.)
Once the interviewer writes a report on the interviews, he or she may
share the report with the participants. Lincoln and Guba (1985) refer to
such sharing as member-checking, and they indicate that it contributes to
the trustworthiness and credibility of the report. But difficult issues can
arise at this point. Some interviewers give a right of review to the partici-
pant that can amount almost to a veto on how the interviewer works
with, analyzes, and writes up the results of the interviewing project. Some
researchers go further and suggest that the participant in the interview
should also become a participant in working with the material (Griffin,
1989). The stances researchers take on this issue are wide ranging (Patai,
1987). At one end of the continuum are those who argue for a type of
co-ownership. At the other are those who suggest that the relationship
ends with the interview, and the only obligations that the writer has are
to make sure the participants knew why they were being interviewed and
the interviewer has not distorted the spirit of what the participant said.
My practice has been to offer to share with participants any material
that concerns them. I especially want to know if in working with the
interview data I have done anything that makes them vulnerable, or if I
have presented anything that is not accurate. Except with regard to issues
of vulnerability or inaccuracy, however, I retain the right to write the
final report as I see it. (In her study of high schools, Lightfoot, 1983, tells
of the awkward situation she encountered when participants in her study
disagreed with her interpretations.)
The type of relationship the interviewer anticipates after the inter-
view is concluded affects the nature of the relationship the interviewer
nurtures during it. If the interviewer has created a full "We" relationship
INTERVIEWING AS A RELATIONSHIP 83
in the process of the interviewing, then he or she must be prepared to deal
with the consequences when the time comes to work with the material
generated in an interview and report on it. To establish such a deeply
sharing, mutually intimate interviewing relationship and then claim one-
sided ownership of the material at the conclusion of the interview may
cause problems. On the other hand, an interviewer who is explicit about
the rights of the participant before the interview begins, and who controls
the distance he or she keeps with the participant, establishes the condition
for an equitable relationship when working with the material.
SOCIAL GROUP IDENTITIES AND THE INTERVIEWING RELATIONSHIP
Issues of equity in an interviewing relationship are affected by the
social identities that participants and interviewers bring to the interview.
Our social identities are affected by our experience with issues of class,
race, ethnicity, and gender, and those social forces interact with the sense
of power in our lives (Kanter, 1977). The interviewing relationship is
fraught with issues of power -who controls the direction of the interview,
who controls the results, who benefits. To negotiate these variables in
developing an equitable interviewing relationship, the interviewer must
be acutely aware of his or her own experience with them i s well as sensi-
tive to the way these issues may be affecting the participants.
Race and Ethnicity
In our society, with its history of racism, researchers and participants
of different racial and ethnic backgrounds face difficulties in establishing
an effective interviewing relationship. It is especially complex for Whites
and African Americans to interview each other, but other interracial or
cross-ethnic pairings can also be problematic. (To explore this important
issue more deeply, see Dexter, 1970; Dollard, 1949; Hyman et al., 1954;
Labov, 1972; Reese, Danielson, Shoemaker, Chang, & Hsu, 1986; Rich-
ardson et al., 1965; Song & Parker, 1995.) In addition, interviewing rela-
tionships between those of the same racial-ethnic background but of dif-
ferent gender, class, and age can engender tensions that inhibit the full
development of an effective interviewing relationship.
That is not to say that individual interviewers and participants cannot
to some extent subvert the societal context in which we do our research.
Interviewers and participants of good will who are from different racial
backgrounds can create a relationship that runs counter to prevailing so-
cial currents. Maintaining sensitivity to issues that trigger distrust as well

84 INTERVIEWINGAS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
as exhibiting good manners, respect, and a genuine interest in the stories
of others can go a long way toward bridging racial and ethnic barriers.
Such bridging attempts are methodologically important. Although
the shared assumptions that come from common backgrounds may make it
easier to build rapport, interviewing requires interviewers to have enough
distance to enable them to ask real questions and to explore, not to share,
assumptions. It would be an unfortunate methodological situation if Afri-
can Americans could interview only other African Americans, Latinos
only other Latinos, Asian Americans only other Asian Americans, Native
Americans only other Native Americans, and European Americans only
other European Americans.
In my own experience, I have found that the three-interview structure
goes some way toward overcoming the initial distrust that can be present
when a European American interviews an African American. The three-
interview structure can mitigate tensions in other cross-racial interviewing
relationships as well. By returning to the participant three times, an inter-
viewer has the opportunity to demonstrate respect, thoughtfulness, and
interest in that individual, all of which can work toward ameliorating
skepticism. Nonetheless, my experience is that racial politics can make
interracial and cross-ethnic interviewing, no matter the structure of the
interviews and the sensitivity of the interviewers, difficultto negotiate.
Of the 76 faculty and administrative participants we interviewed in
our community college study (Seidman et al., 1983), only one terminated
the interviews before the series was completed. That participant was a
male, African American administrator at a community college who with-
drew near the end of the first interview. At the time, he gave no reason.
He just said that he wanted to stop.
I remember the feeling of disappointment as my colleague Sullivan
and I left the interview. We searched our minds for what had precipitated
his decision. I felt both guilty and disheartened and was on the verge of
losing confidence in the interviewing methodology. Later, as I reflected
further on the episode, I realized that our interview study had become
caught up in the racial history and politics of our society. Perhaps instead
of being a failure, our interview method had been working too well. As
our participant had spoken of his life history, he had begun to deal with
the way racism had played out in his life and his career. I think he found
himself speaking more honestly to White interviewers than he cared to
(Anderson, Silver, & Abramson, 1988; Cotter, Cohen, & Coulter, 1982).
His withdrawing was a loss to us and our study.
Linda Miller Cleary met a similarly complex situation in her research
on American Indian education. Cleary prepares teachers of secondary
INTERVIEWINGAS A RELATIONSHIP 85
English at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She has a significant
number of students who are Ojibwe and most will teach American Indian
students. She developed a research project, initially to find out more about
the experience of teachers of American Indian students to better prepare
her students to do that work. In an interview with me in 1996, Cleary said
that she felt "always suspect" whenever she sought access to American
Indian educators. She said she sensed a distrust of her motives and inten-
tions. After one series of interviews was completed, one participant asked
her pointedly, "Why are you doing this?"
She was well into her research when, because of the suspicion she had
faced in establishing access and in each initial interview, she realized that
"people aren't going to trust me as an author." Although she felt she had
been able to get beyond much of the initial distrust and gather good
material in her interviews, she wanted "another perspective . . . in the
process of analysis." She came to the decision that, "I really couldn't do it
alone . . . the gap was too big" (L. M. Cleary, personal communication,
August 11,1996).
Facing the issue head on, Cleary solved it by inviting a colleague,
Thomas Peacock, who holds the Endowed Chair of American Indian Edu-
cation at her university, to join her in the research project. By teaming
with a colleague who knew firsthand the complexities of their American
Indian participants' experience, she took a significant step toward strength-
ening the equity between researchers and participants and the authority
of the research. Their collaborative work is represented in their book,
Collected Wisdom: American Indian Education (Cleary & Peacock,
1997), in which they discuss not only the subject of the research but also
the significant methodological issues inherent in it.
Gender
There is evidence that interviewers and participants of different gen-
ders get different interviewing results than do those of the same gender
(Hyman et al., 1954). The interviewing relationship that develops when
participant and interviewer are different genders can be deeply affected
by sexist attitudes and behaviors. All the problems that one can associate
with sexist gender relationships can be played out in an interview. Males
interviewing female participants can be overbearing. Women interview-
ing men can sometimes be reluctant to control the focus of the interview.
Male participants can be too easily dismissive of female interviewers. In-
terviewers of both genders can fail to see the possibilities of whole areas of
exploration if their perspectives are ideologically laden. Nor are interviews

86 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
among interviewers and participants of the same gender automatically
unproblematic. They can be plagued by the false assumption of shared
perspectives or a sense of competition never stated.
In addition to affecting individual relationships between interviewers
and participants, sexism influences the total context of research. Inter-
viewing research itself can be characterized as "soft" research -research
not likely to yield "hard" data- and can thereby be minimized by a sexist
research community (Callaway, 1981). On another level, Patai (1987)
argues that if interviewers use women for their own research ends, no
matter how well-intentioned the research study is, the dominant paradigm
of a society's exploiting women is supported rather than challenged.
There is also the possibility of sexual exploitation in in-depth inter-
viewing because of the sense of intimacy that can develop. Participants
talk about the details of their lives while the interviewer listens attentively.
A natural bond of fondness and respect develops as the interviewer and
the participant explore the participant's experience. Clearly, it is impor-
tant for interviewers not to exploit that bond sexually.
In one study, a research assistant told me how she had become at-.-
tracted to one of her participants as a result of interviewing. She wanted
to talk about her feelings and their implications for the interview process.
She knew that any connection with the participant outside the interview
structure would serve only to distort the interviewing relationship. She
was worried that even if she had no outside contact with the participant,
her fond feelings were affecting the way she asked questions. (SeeHyman
et al., 1954, p. 54, for another example of how the cordiality of the
interviewing relationship affects the way interviewers ask questions.) It
helped when I assured her that her feelings were reasonable, but I also
emphasized the importance of staying focused on the purpose of the inter-
views.
It is possible for male and female interviewers and participants to
subvert the gender-role stereotypes sexist society would have them play.
Interviewers of both sexes can study transcripts of interviews they have
done, reconstructing the arrangements they have made to see how they
might have employed sexist assumptions in building their interviewing
relationships. They can also examine those relationships by reflecting on
their interviewing experience in a journal or with a peer. Most important,
in the interviewing relationship itself, they can demonstrate a conscious-
ness of sexism and concern for gender equity. (For further reading on the
subject of gender and interviewing, see an excellent discussion in chap. 5
of Yow, 1994; also Edwards, 1990; Herod, 1993; Riessman, 1987; Rosser,
1992; Williams & Heikes, 1993.)
INTERVIEWING AS A RELATIONSHIP
Class, Hierarchy, and Status
When interviewer and participant eye each other through the lens of
class consciousness, the stories told and the experiences shared can be
distorted (Hyman et al., 1954). A lack of consciousness about class issues
can be injurious to both the participant and the interviewer (Sennett &
Cobb, 1972).
In a discussion of class in Marxist terms, Patai (1987) described the
interviewer as a hybrid of a capitalist and a laborer who is capable of
treating the words of participants as commodities to be exploited. If one
understands class as a function of status, education, and wealth, inter-
viewers are often middle class and university based, interviewing those
who are in some way lower on a scale of status. (Dexter, 1970, runs
counter to that notion.)
When we did our study of community college faculty, I became con-
sciousof their sensitivity to the higher education totem pole. In the context
of the university, school of education faculty rank low. Some community
college faculty participants, however, treated me with either an unwar-
ranted skepticism because of my affiliation with what they perceived as
the ivory tower, or an unearned deference because of my affiliation with a
university, in contrast to their self-description of being "just" in a commu-
nity college.
Even the use of interviewing itself can be affected by class-based
assumptions. For example, Richardson et al. (1965) wrote that partici-
pants of
low intelligence, low socio-economic status, or low status in an organized
hierarchy may find it difficultto tolerate a preponderance of open questions
because they are unused to talking at length spontaneously, articulately, or
coherently, or because they are uncomfortable in an unstructured situation.
( p 149).
My experience has been that when participants, whatever their class back-
ground, place their work in the context of their life histories and are given
the space to tell their stories, they can respond to open-ended questions.
On the other hand, when class, gender, or racial tension pervades the
interviewing relationship, participants are likely to be tight-lipped and
restricted in their responses (Labov, 1972; Patton, 1989).
Some interviewers have a wider range of class versatility than others.
Given their own life histories, they are able to operate comfortably with
people lower and higher in the class structure than they are. Others' life

88 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
experience has been so homogeneous that they are comfortable only when
they are interviewing participants whose social-class experiences are simi-
lar to their own. They are reluctant to interview in settings in which they
have little experience or classes of people with whom they have had little
contact. That reluctance can sometimes result in a skewed sample of parti-
cipants being interviewed and a picture of the experience being studied
that is narrower than warranted.
Linguistic Differences
An issue embedded in many of the social relationships described above
is linguistic differences between interviewers and participants. Sometimes
English-speaking researchers interview participants for whom English is
not the firstlanguage. If interviewers are fluent in the participants' mother
tongue and interview in that language, they will subsequently face the
complexity of translation. The issue of finding the right word in English or
any other language to represent the full sense of the word the participants
spoke in their native language is demanding and requires a great deal of
care (Vygotsky, 1987).
Some doctoral students with whom I have worked who are fluent in
the native language of their participants have experimented with inter-
viewing in English and going along with their participants as they may
switch back and forth between English and their mother tongue. When
reporting on the interviews, especially in crucial segments, the researchers
sometimes report the language of the participants as spoken in the mother
tongue to honor that language and the thought patterns inherent in it.
They then provide a translation immediately following the portion spoken
in the mother tongue.
What is at issuein interviewing participants whose first language is not
that of the interviewer is the extent to which the language used by both the
participants and the interviewer affects the progress of the interview. The
thinking of both the participants and the interviewer is intertwined with
the language they are using (Vygotsky, 1987). As in most issues regarding
interviewing, there is not oneright way to respond to these situations, except
to recognize the importance of language and culture to thought. With that
awareness, both interviewer and participants can experiment with ways of
talking to each other that most authentically reflect their thinking. (Forfur-
ther reading on this subject, see Goldstein, 1995.)
In addition to race, gender, and class, the relative ages of the partici-
pant and the interviewer may affect the type of relationship that develops
INTERVIEWING AS A RELATIONSHIP 89
between them. Some older participants may feel uncomfortable being
interviewed by a young interviewer, especially if they feel that the inter-
viewer places them in a subordinate role (Briggs, 1986). Interviewing
participants who are much younger or much older takes a special type
of sensitivity on the part of the interviewer. He or she must know
how to connect to children or seniors without patronizing them. When
class, race, linguistic, and age differences are combined, especially in
groups of school-age children, the danger that an interviewer will
elicit distorted responses is high (Brenner et al., 1985). But when inter-
viewed skillfully and with consciousness of class, race, and age, children
can be thoughtful about their experience in and out of school and are
capable of reflection that is informative and compelling (Labov, 1972).
(For an example of effective interviewing of young adults, see Cleary,
1990, 1991.)
Elites
Of the imbalances that can occur in the relationship between inter-
viewer and participant, one of the most difficult to negotiate occurs when
researchers try to use an in-depth interviewing approach with people in
positions of power. Sally Lynne Conkright (1997) used the method de-
scribed in this book to interview 11chief executive officers or those on the
next rung of authority in 11 significant U.S. corporations. She met the
expected problems of access, which she overcame to a considerable extent.
She also faced serious problems in carrying out her interviewing plan.
Executives who had agreed in advance to 90-minute interviews would
develop very busy schedules. By the time she arrived for the interview,
some could or would only give her a shorter amount of time.
On a different level, she noted that elites are often accustomed to
being in charge of situations in which they find themselves. A number of
her participants tried to take charge of the interviews. Sometimes, when
Conkright tried to direct the interview, she noted that her participants
became uncomfortable. "In some instances," she wrote, "the signals were
nonverbal in nature and, in other instances, the participants verbally ex-
pressed that they would direct the interview" (pp. 274-275). She had to
walk a very narrow line between asking questions in which she was inter-
ested and recognizing that such questions might threaten to lead to the
termination of the interview.
Despite these complexities, she sustained her research and learned
a great deal about both her subject and the methodology as applied to
interviewing elites. Although I see this approach to interviewing as most
appropriate for getting at the details of everyday experience of those in less
power-laden and status-oriented positions, still the attempt to gain the

90 INTERVIEWINGAS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
inner perspective of elites is worthwhile and important. (For further read-
ing on this topic, see Dexter, 1970; Hertz & Imber, 1995.)
DISTINGUISHAMONG PRIVATE, PERSONAL, AND PUBLIC
Interviewing relationships are also shaped by what the interviewer
and participant deem are appropriate subjects to explore in the interview.
In considering what is appropriate, interviewers may find it useful to
distinguish among public, personal, and private aspects of a participant's
life (Shils, 1959). The public aspect is what participants do, for example,
at work or at school, in meetings, in classes, in offices where their actions
are subject to the scrutiny of others. Interviewers tend to be most comfort-
able exploring these public aspects of participants' experience.
Participants' private lives involve matters of intimacy, like aspects of
relationships participants do not discuss with outsiders for fear of violating
those relationships. Each participant or interviewer may have different
boundaries for what he or she considers public, personal, and private. In
one interview, I asked a participant to talk more about her engagement,
which she had mentioned briefly earlier. She said to me very directly,
"That's none of your business."
Participants also have personal lives that bridge their public and pri-
vate experiences. Personal lives are of at least two basic types. The first is
participants' subjective experience of public events. Interviewers tend to
feel comfortable exploring that aspect of personal experience. Indeed, that
is one of the major functions of interviewing as a research method. The
second is participants' experience of events that do not occur in their
public lives but in their experience with friends and family away from the
workplace or school.
New interviewers tend to be less comfortable exploring experiences in
this realm. They often question its relevance to the subject of their study.
The dichotomy between what is personal and what is public, however, is
often false. What happens in people's personal lives often affects what
happens in or provides a context for their public lives and can be useful if
tactfully explored in interviewing research. "May I ask," not just as a pro
forma statement but seriously meant, is a preface I often put to questions
when entering troubling or sensitive areas.
Sometimes interviewers shy away from exploring areas such as death
and illness because they themselves are personally uncomfortable, and
they assume the participant is too (Hyman et al., 1954; Rowan, 1981). If
a participant mentions topics such as these, however, he or she thinks they
are relevant. To ignore them or not to explore how they might relate to
INTERVIEWINGAS A RELATIONSHIP
the subject of the research may signal to the participant that what is most
important to him or her is somehow not important to the interviewer. If
the participant has risked mentioning a personal topic, my experience is
that it is important to acknowledge it and to explore the relationship
between that personal experience and the subject of the inquiry.
AVOID A THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP
At the same time, interviewers must avoid changing the interviewing
relationship into a therapeutic one. Many see a similarity between the
type of open-ended, relatively nondirective interviewing that I have been
discussing in this book and the type of exploration that takes place in
psychotherapy. It is essential that research interviewers not confuse them-
selves with therapists. The goals are different (Kahn & Cannell, 1960;
Kvale, 1996, pp. 155-157). The researcher is there to learn, not to treat
the participant. The participant did not seek out the researcher and is not
a patient. The researcher will see the participant three times, after which
their connection will substantially end. They will not have a continuing
relationship in which the researcher takes some measure of ongoing re-
sponsibility. Researchers are unlikely to be trained therapists. They should
know both their own limits and those imposed by the structure and goal of
the interviewing process. Researchers must be very cautious about ap-
proaching areas of participants' private lives and personal complexities to
which they are ill-equipped to respond and for which they can take no
effectiveresponsibility.
But even when researchers exercise such caution, the intimacy that
can develop in in-depth interviewing sometimes threatens those limits,
and a participant may find the interviewing process emotionally troubling
(Griffin,1989).Participants may start to cry in an interview. Interviewers
may themselves become upset in the face of a participant's tears and not
know what to do. My experience is that many times the best thing to do is
nothing. Let the participant work out the distress without interfering and
taking inappropriate responsibility for it. On the other hand, if the distress
continues, the interviewer then has the responsibility to pull back from
whatever is causing it.
In my mind, a key to negotiating potentially troubled waters is to
assess how much responsibility the interviewer can effectively take in navi-
gating them. In one interview, a participant referred repeatedly to a col-
league's nervous breakdown. As much as I was interested in the subject, I
did not follow up on it because the participant's repeated references to it
troubled me. We were near the end of the third interview. I was not

92 INTERVIEWINGAS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
planning to return to the participant's campus the next week. I would not
be able to follow up if exploring the topic caused the participant emotional
distress. One boundary I learned to observe was the one that marked
where I could take effective responsibility for follow-up and where I could
not.
RECIPROCITY
The issue of reciprocity in the interviewing relationship can be trou-
bling. The more the interviewing relationship is charged with issues
of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, the more complicated the problem of
reciprocity can be. Patai (1987) in her study of Brazilian women, most of
whom were poor, agonized over what could be perceived as inequity in
her research. She wrote a book (Patai, 1988) based on her findings and
gained the benefits that usually accrue from such publication. On the
other hand, she felt her participants gained little tangible benefit from
their cooperation with her. Rowan (1981)talks about the lack of reciproc-
ity that can lead to alienation in research. He sees it as alienation because
the researcher is separating participants from their words and then using
those words to his or her own ends.
This is the most problematic aspect of interviewing to me. I am sym-
pathetic to the argument that the researcher gets more out of the process
than the participant. I know, however, and others write about (Patai,
1987;Yow, 1994) the type of listeqing the interviewer brings to the inter-
view. It takes the participants seriously, values what they say, and honors
the details of their lives. The reciprocity I can offer in an interview is that
which flows from my interest in participants' experience, my attending to
what they say, and my honoring their words when I present their experi-
ence to a larger public. Although at the conclusion of the interview I do
present my participants with a small gift, that gift is only a token of my
appreciation in the fullest sense of the word token. I use it to say thank
you and to mark the conclusion of that part of our interviewing relation-
ship. (See Marshall & Rossman, 1989; Yow, 1994, for a fuller discussion.)
EQUITY
Interviewers and participants are never equal. We can strive to re-
duce hierarchical arrangements, but usually the participant and the inter-
viewer want and get different things out of the interview. Despite differ-
ent purposes, researchers can still strive for equity in the process. By equity
INTERVIEWINGAS A RELATIONSHIP 93
I mean a balance between means and ends, between what is sought and
what is given, between process and product, and a sense of fairness and
justice that pervades the relationship between participant and inter-
viewer.
Building equity in the interviewing relationship starts when the inter-
viewer first makes contact with the participant. Equity means the inter-
viewer's going out of his or her way to get the stories of people whose
stories are not usually heard. It means the interviewer's not promising
what cannot be delivered, and making sure to deliver what is promised. It
means being explicit about the purposes and processes of the research.
Equity is supported in an explicit written consent form that outlines the
rights and responsibilities of the interviewer and the participant in as
detailed a manner as reasonable. Equity is involved in scheduling time and
place of interviews. Interviewers are asking a great deal of participants. It
keeps the process fair when interviewers set up times and places that are
convenient to the participant and reasonable for the interviewer. Equity
is also involved in the technique of interviewing. An interviewer who is
intrusive, who constantly reinforces responses he or she may like- who is
really looking for corroboration of personal views rather than the story of
the participant's experience-is not being fair to the purpose of in-depth
interviewing. Being equitable in interviewing research means, as we see in
Chapter 8, valuing the words of the participant because those words are
deeply connected to that participant's sense of worth. Being equitable in
interviewing research means infusing a research methodology with respect
for the dignity of those interviewed.
Researchers cannot be expected to resolve all the inequities of society
reproduced in their interviewing relationships, but they do have the re-
sponsibility to be conscious of them. Some would argue, though, that
research in the social sciences that does not confront these problems con-
tributes to them. (See Fay, 1987, for a review of critical research.) My
own sense of the matter is that although it is difficult to do equitable
research in an inequitable society, equity must be the goal of every in-
depth interviewing researcher. Striving for equity is not only an ethical
imperative; it is also a methodological one. An equitable process is the
foundation for the trust necessary for participants to be willing to share
their experience with an interviewer.
Every step of the interview process can be designed and carried out
with the idea of equity in mind. But try as one may to be equitable in
interviewing research, equity in interviewing is affected by factors such as
racism, classism, and sexism originating outside the individual interview-
ing relationship or taking place within it. What I have come to grasp over
the years I have been doing interviewing research is that the equity of an

94 INTERVIEWING AS QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
interviewing relationship, and thereby the quality of the interview, is
affected and sometimes seriously limited by social inequities. At the same
time, individuals committed to equity in research can find a way first to
become conscious of the issues and their own role in them. They can then
devise methods that attempt to subvert those societal constraints. In the
process they may end up being able to tell their participants' stories in a
way that can promote equity.
Analyzing, Interpreting, and
Sharing Interview Material
Research based on in-depth interviewing is labor intensive. There is no
substitute for studying the interviews and winnowing the almost 1million
words a study involving 25 participants might yield. (Each series of three
interviews can result in 150 double-spaced pages of transcript.) In plan-
ning such a study, allow at least as much time for working with the
material as for all the steps involved in conceptualizing the study, writing
the proposal, establishing access, making contact, selecting participants,
and doing the actual interviews.
MANAGING THE DATA
To work with the material that interviewing generates, the researcher
first has to make it accessible by organizing it. Keeping track of partici-
pants through the participant information forms, making sure the written
consent forms are copied and filed in a safe place, labeling audiohpes of
interviews accurately, managing the extensive files that develop in the
course of working with the transcripts of interviews, and keeping track of
decision points in the entire process all require attention to detail, a con-
cern for security, and a system for keeping material accessible. One goal
of this administrative work is to be able to trace interview data to the
original source on the interview tape at all stages of the research. Another
is to be able to contact a participant readily. The simple act of misfiling a
written consent form from a participant upon whose material a researcher
wants to rely heavily can create hours of extra work and unnecessary
anxiety.