I am starting to think (again) about the ethics of interviewing. For my PhD I was doing narrative research. This means that I wanted people to speak freely about their experiences, without being too constrained by my specific interests, and to do so with stories. So, I started by saying to the long-term prisoners I interviewed:
‘I am interested in hearing your story about your sentence, so I can hear what you think is important about it.’
A few, very talkative, men did tell stories, sometimes even before I had started the interview or switched on the recorder. In these stories, they themselves were often the hero, struggling against powerful forces. Most of the men I spoke to, though, struggled to answer with narratives. They instead gave very short answers, summed up the offences they had committed or struggled to settle on one topic.
Silverman (2001) has pointed out that open-ended questions do not only give the interviewees freedom to answer as they wish. They also put pressure on the interviewee to provide extended answers and to decide what is relevant, which can be difficult, especially when questions are very broad. Since my fieldwork, I have often wondered how I would answer a question like ‘tell me about your time in university’. I think I would need quite a lot more input to feel confident that I was giving the interviewer what they needed. For example, were they interested in my social life or in what I learned? Or did they want to know what I thought about the universities I went to?
For the interviews in this project, I will have a pre-interview meeting with each of my interviewees, to explain the questions underlying the research. I hope this will make it easier for people to respond to my questions. Before the beginning of the proper research, I will also ask participants to identify the periods that make up their life (e.g. primary school, secondary school, apprenticeship, first job etc.), along with major events (marriage, having kids) and their sentences. I hope that having it all written down will help them to talk through their life and their sentences.