Speaker 1: When thinking about interviewing, one has to think about interviewer behavior, not just in the sense of person-oriented or task-oriented, but also in the sense of power or role. And in the early 80s, Anne Oakley wrote about the interview as a power game. She wrote about the interviewer as the powerful one who was using respondents, or who was trying to use the respondents in order to objectify, create neutral social science. And she had a harsh critique on that. And she said, what we need to do as researchers, what we need to do as interviewers, especially as feminist interviewers, she said, we have to focus a lot more on non-hierarchical relationships. And so she suggested power sharing. She suggested reciprocity. She suggested that in order to ask people to disclose something about themselves, you have to disclose about yourself as well as an interviewer. Her focus was very much on power, how interviewers use power or abused power even. Her article or her book chapter was really important and tremendously influential in the interviewing literature. That was because she had a very strong focus on rapport, on the trust relationship, and especially on this reciprocity. If you ask someone to disclose, you have to disclose yourself a bit as well. And people have been discussing that since that time. And with various strands of epistemological and ontological points of view, people have been discussing this reciprocity. Do we need to disclose as interviewers or not? Are we abusing our interviewees? And when you're doing an interview yourself, sometimes it really feels like this. Now you're going to tell me all your personal stories and I'm going to use them. So there is some sense of power distinction. And the second reason why this critique was tremendously influential was because as one of the first, besides the ethnomethodologist, one of the first, she said, you have to look at the interview itself. She said there is no difference between the topic and the method. How can you, as a feminist researcher or as a critical researcher, doesn't really matter. How can you use the people you are trying to advocate for, probably? How can you do action research when you place yourself above others? When you use your interview in a very classical, a little bit 1950s sense of getting information and for the rest, please don't talk. So she looked at the interview as a power game. The interviewer as powerful and the interviewee as not so powerful. There has been a lot of critique on this book chapter as well. She herself and Oakley herself also criticized her own work, but it was a very important piece of work. Later authors discuss whether this power game is really taking place or it's not so much as a game or maybe it's more of a power dance. For instance, the interviewer is pretty powerful. The interviewer is an expert, if we use that word. The interviewer determines the topic of the conversation. It's a conversation with a purpose for the interviewer, not so much probably for the interviewee. The interviewer poses the questions and selects which questions are relevant and which are not. But the interviewer also tests the answers, assesses the answers. And sometimes people feel that they're in an exam. In some interviews I did, or my interviewers did, people said something like that. It feels a bit like an exam. So you're on a chair, you're lower, as an interviewee you have less power. The interviewer decides after assessing the answer to probe and to prompt. So OK, this is OK, I know enough, let's continue. Or I need more information. So it is a bit like an exam sometimes. And very important, the interviewer decides when the interview has finished. Even when rapport is terrible, people don't get up and walk away from an interview. If you see this on television, it's news, because not often it happens. It's the interviewer who decides, now it's enough. So the interviewer is the expert. But if you've ever done an interview yourself, very often you don't feel like this. It's more, I would suggest, a power dance than a power game. Because the interviewee is an expert him or herself as well. How? Well, sometimes it's totally different. You're on your knees, asking, begging for information. You're begging as an interviewer, the expert for his or her opinion, story, something from the heart, something from the brain, or whatever you want, something from the past. And the interviewee decides what information to give and what information not to share. So it's about what the interviewee decides on, why to tell certain information and other information not, or not at all, how to tell this information, how to share it, how much to share it, and how specific. And you, as an interviewer, are just there begging and trying to get something out of him or her. So sometimes, as an interviewer, you're pretty powerless. You're on your knees. So we can look at the interview as a power dance. But maybe we can also look at the interview in a slightly different way. Again, use a more Goffman-like approach. Look at the interview as a form of role-playing. Like we did in the lecture on participant observation, where, as a participant in research, you play a role. Well, the same accounts for interview. The interviews, you can also look at them as a stage where we play a role, where we play the interviewer, and you, or the interviewee, plays the role of answering the questions. And after the interview, you break out of this role-play, and you play another role as guest and host, or something like that. So if you look at the interview not per se in terms of power, but more in terms of role-playing, then other options to envision the interview come near as well. Because then you can see the interviewer, or the interviewee, as a teacher. And the interviewer as some sort of student. Not just as a researcher, but the interviewer can play the student role, whereas the interviewee can play the teacher role. Let me explain it to you. I will guide you. I will be the expert, and you will be the one who gets taught. And then, in the next question, you play the critical, or the nice interviewer. So you play different, different roles. If you look at the interview from this perspective, you quickly get to a certain type of role that works pretty well. So in general, my suggestion to all my students is try to play a pretty naive role. The naive outsider, as people call it. And this is an example of the naive outsider. Probably you recognize Louis Theroux, who's doing research or making interviews among people very different from him. And what he does is he plays a naive role. He doesn't know anything about the content of what people tell him, but he knows a lot about what he wants to know, and why he wants to know it. So before doing an interview, think about the role you want to play. Think about what information you want to get, because you're an expert on the questions. So you have to be an expert on the questions. But try to be a little naive on the answers. You might get surprised.