It’s interesting, one of the things that I’ve written which is the most quoted, is
this chapter in the book edited by Helen Roberts, called, Doing Feminist Research [1981] – which
is the [chapter] on interviewing women, which she asked me to write!
I never would have written it otherwise.
And it provoked quite a lot of discussion in the literature, quite a lot of it quite
critical, which I think is good, because the whole point about doing something and saying
something is you want people to engage with it and point out where it was that you were
wrong.
Also what I was highlighting was, I think, the discrepancy between the textbook model
of interviewing and what actually happens, because I do not – I did not and do not
- believe that many people out there interviewing people about crucial life experiences, could
possibly have presented themselves as interviewers in this totally mechanistic hygienic way as
instruments of data collection.
That isn’t how it works.
And, indeed, people are not going to confide, they’re not going to talk to you if they
think you’re not a person listening to them.
On a very basic level I found it a very unreal description, not only of what was happening
in my own research world, but in other people’s practices of research.
You wrote the article in terms of women interviewing women, but would the same thing apply to women
interviewing men, and men interviewing men?
Many of the same issues would apply, yes.
They’re about how an interviewer responds when somebody that he or she is interviewing,
asks a question.
For example, one of the questions I was asked in the Becoming a Mother study was, “Is
it all right to leave a young baby alone in the house?”
Do you actually say, “Well, you should ask an expert about that”, or do you give an
answer?
Another one I remember is, “Can you avoid your baby having a cot death if you don’t
use a cot?”
“I’m sorry, but you’ve got to go and ask an expert!”
And perhaps the question that most of all made me think about all this was a young woman
having - well, they were all having their first babies, who, about three weeks before
the baby was due, asked me if I could tell her which hole the baby came out of.
I mean, that is a reflection of the state of ante-natal [education] at the time, partly,
but it wasn’t a question to which I felt that I could say, “I’m not going to answer
you”.
I know that people who are interviewing get asked questions: does one really respond by
saying, “Don’t ask me.
I’m not really a person”?
So in that sense, and in other senses, these are real life issues about interviewing which
apply whatever the gender of the interviewer, and whatever the gender of the interviewee.
There are, though, some issues to do with, particularly, I think, at the time, which
was one at which feminist ideas were quite widely discussed - issues to do with sisterhood,
and a woman talking to a woman about shared experiences.
I think this makes the distance thing more difficult, and even, perhaps, unethical.
I have said there, and in other places, particularly in much of the stuff that I’ve written about
experimental methods, that I think, ultimately, there is this tension between ethics and science
in a lot of research.
To do what some people would regard as the ethical thing, is to deviate from canons of
good scientific method, and possibly vice-versa.
It’s a balance that we have to negotiate and think about.
It’s the same for medical researchers, so it’s nothing specific to social research.