Doing Qualitative Research Differently

: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method. Hollway, Wendy, & Jefferson, Tony. (2000). London, Thousand Oak, and New Delhi: Sage.

Introduction: the Need to do Research Differently (pp.1-6)

The authors question the veracity of accounts that a research subject tell during interview. For them, one of the reasons for believing is democratic and related to power differentials between researcher and researched. Feminists, according to the author, have been conscious of this issue of power differentials and advocated the principles of giving voice to voiceless women. However, the authors claim that researchers cannot give voice to others, quoting a statement by Reissman (1993, Narrative Analysis, p. 3):
"we cannot give voice" since we "do not have direct access to another's experience. We deal with ambiguous representations of it--talk, text, interaction and interpretation"

[This argument is not logical. Giving voice does not mean directly accessing someone's experience.]

From the standpoint of critical realism (Bunge, 1993; Watkins, 1994-5), the authors argue that researchers interpret their subject's experience only through ambiguous representations of it, yet there is a relationship between people's representations and their experiences. Here the emphasis is given to that the relationship, tracked only by the researcher, depends on the researcher's particular view.

Producing Data with defended subjects (26-54)
From their pilot studies, the authors delineate four distinct approaches to interview: traditional, feminist, narrative, and clinical case-study. While traditional approaches focus on interview technique, feminists are conscious of power balance between interviewer and interviewee. In narrative approaches, an interviewee becomes a story-teller, thus the interview agenda is open to development, depending on the interviewee's experiences. Clinical case-study emphasizes a researcher's reflexivity on their own involvement in the interview process, such as anxiety, personal experience, etc.

The authors propose biographical-interpretative method. It emulates a biographer's role to listen to someone's story and make a coherent account out of the story-telling, Gestalt, explaining, "a whole which is more than the sum of its parts, an order or hidden agenda" (p. 34). The authors propose four principles of this method: (1) the more open the better, (2) elicit stories (i.e. Tell me about a time when you feel unsafe.), (3) avoid why questions to obtain concrete meanings from the interviewee. Why questions usually induce empty, cliché-ridden discussion, the authors assert. (4) Follow up using respondents' ordering and phrasing by taking a note.

The authors emphasize free association that comes unconsciously during interview.