In-depth interviewing

The qualitative in-depth or long interview seeks, through questioning, to obtain knowledge of the interviewee’s world. A major aim of this type of interviewing is “to explore the contextual boundaries of the experience or perception, to uncover what is usually hidden from ordinary view or reflection” (Johnson, 2002: 106-107). It is a research method that gives a privileged access to our basic experience of the lived world (Kvale, 1996: 54). This type of interview usually has a pre-set theme, but the interviewer and the interviewee are free to respond and explore whatever issues they identify as relevant to the research question or that has meaning to the interviewee (Holstein &

Gubrium, 2003: 3-29). Qualitative interviewing is usually concerned with the inside story that can only be told adequately through the deployment of flexible questions (Kvale, 1996: 3-14). Flexibility during interviews allows for the accommodation of the participant’s story even if it deviates from the study agenda.

The discussion in the above paragraph raises a methodological issue in in-depth interviewing, namely whether interview responses are to be treated as giving direct access to experience or as actively constructed narratives (Gubrium & Holstein, 1995: 4).

Since the epistemology of a qualitative interview is more constructionist than positivist (Warren, 2002: 83), a suggested argument would be that interview responses are actively constructed narratives. These constructions are nonetheless to be treated as ‘real’ to the participants, because the aim is to understand the meaning attached to the recalled life experiences. Such understanding cannot be gained from surveys or questionnaires that leave no room for individual experiential nuances (Platt, 2002: 51). Interview participants are seen as meaning makers, and not as “passive vessels of answers for experiential questions put to them by interviewers” (Gubrium & Holstein, 2002: 13).

In addition, an in-depth interview is seen as a conversation which has a structure and a purpose where the outcome is a co-production of the interviewer and the interviewee (Gubrium & Holstein, 2002: 12-17; Kvale, 1996: 6). The aim of my study is to obtain a coherent picture of the women’s life stories and the AIDS narratives through the interactive process of in-depth interviewing. Armed with this knowledge, I

approached the women as active storytellers of their past and present experiences. I did not perceive them as “passive vessels of answers” to my questions, nor did I see them as

“repositories of facts, feelings, and the related particulars of experience” (Gubrium &

Holstein, 2002: 13). Like other qualitative interviewers, I was sensitive to their power and control over their life stories. How they accessed and made sense of events and experiences in their pasts, and how they related them to their current situations (Mishler, 1999 in Riessman, 2003: 341). Even though the interviewer seems to be the ‘person in- charge’ during the interview session (Kvale, 1996: 20), the interviewee ultimately has the power to veto what gets told and how it is told, as the following interview excerpt with one of the grandmothers in this study demonstrates:

Interviewer: Are your two daughters who are also HIV+ Lulama’s immediate siblings [Lulama is a study participant]?

Nonceba: I had a son after Lulama who was stabbed to death. Then after him, it is my two sons and then the two daughters. One of them stays with us in the outside room and the other one stays in Extension Eight.

In the above illustration, the grandmother chooses to include her sons in response to an inquiry on her daughters. Based on this response, one can infer that to this grandmother, all the children need to be included, especially when talking about their birth order. She is not restricted or bound by the study focus area – women infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. In the following exchange, she again shows how a respondent can qualify or change a topic at will:

Interviewer: How is your relationship with your daughters now, and when they were young?

Nonceba: First, before I answer this question let me say something more about Lulama. Ever since her injury at the farm, she has been suffering from severe headaches. These headaches are worsened by the smell of food, so it is very difficult to know what to prepare for her. She only likes to eat things that don’t have strong aromas, such as mealie porridge or pap. The other two daughters were good as young girls, but now they are very troublesome as they drink a lot.

Again, the question is very specific and yet she chooses to elaborate on a point which may seem as an incoherent account or a digression to the interviewer. For her, the above response is a qualifier to an earlier interview point about her relationship with Lulama. This echoes Riessman’s (2003: 331) observation that “it is a common experience for investigators to craft interview questions carefully only to have participants respond with lengthy accounts, long stories that appear on the surface to have little to do with the questions”. Riessman (2003) in one of her studies on divorce noted that participants tended to digress from seemingly straightforward questions. She found, like I did, that

“the participants were resisting our efforts to fragment their experiences into thematic (codable) categories – our attempts, in effect, to control meaning” (Riessman, 2003: 331).

Despite the above alleged digressions and the participants’ resistance to our efforts to contain their lengthy narratives, they are nonetheless quite aware of the “rules of conversational storytelling” (Riessman, 2003: 331). To continue with the grandmother, she is aware of the interview/conversational rules. She states that she would like to say something before responding to the question, “first before I answer this question let me say something more about Lulama” (Nonceba, 77 years old, Grahamstown). This signals to me that what she is about to say will not be directly related to the question at hand, but is meaningful and adds coherence to her story. This illustration highlights the difference between the traditional or standard practice of research interviewing on the one side and the life world of naturally occurring conversation and social interaction on the other (Mishler 1996 in Riessman 2003: 331). It is for this reason that feminist and narrative researchers give voice to the researched by respecting the participant’s way of organising meaning in her/his life (see Gluck & Patai, 1991; Josselson & Lieblich, 1995). In so doing, these researchers ‘welcome’ and accommodate narratives that have no direct bearing on their research topic. These ‘digressive’ narratives do not fragment participants’ stories. Instead, such narratives help in presenting holistic accounts of the particular topic from the participant’s perspective (ibid.).

The above discussion shows the complexities inherent in in-depth interviewing, and an attempt to deal with and acknowledge these intricate matters (see Gubrium &

Holstein, 2002; Holstein & Gubrium, 2003; Riessman, 2003). I will continue to deal with some of these complexities throughout this chapter.