Cross-Cultural Interviewing: Feminist Experiences and Reflections

Description

Interviewing is one of the most common techniques used to conduct qualitative research in the social sciences and humanities. As a result of globalization, researchers increasingly conduct interviews cross-, inter- and intra-nationally. This raises important questions about how differences and sameness are understood and negotiated within the interview situation, as well as the power structures at play within qualitative research, and the role that reflexivity plays in mediating these. What does it mean to interview Black women as a Black woman? How is ethnicity negotiated across various qualitative research encounters? How are differences bridged or asserted in feminist interviewing? These are just some of the questions explored in the chapters in this volume. Drawing on their recent research, the contributors detail their experiences of engaging in qualitative interviewing and examine how they negotiated the various dilemmas they encountered. The contributions challenge some of the assumptions made in early feminist work on interviewing, providing nuanced accounts of actual research experiences. This volume explores the practice and implications of conducting cross-, inter- and intra-cultural interviewing, bringing together researchers from a range of disciplines and countries to describe and analyse both its vicissitudes and its advantages. Contents Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction • Gabriele Griffin Part I: Cross-cultural interviewing 1 Interviewing as negotiation • Gabriele Griffin 2 Interviewing across cultures: talking to mothers and daughters in Hong Kong and Britain • Stevi Jackson, Petula Sik Ying Ho and Jin Nye Na 3 Cross-cultural interviewing with/as minority women • Beatrice Akua-Sakyiwah 4 Rethinking the proximics of interviewing • Marianne Liliequist Part II: Interviewing in another culture: managing difference 5 Living differences: experiences from Botswana • Stephanie Smith 6 Being an outsider: the vicissitudes of cross-cultural interviewing in a politically and culturally sensitive context • Christina Svens 7 Dealing with being the outsider in qualitative interviewing: on interviewing representatives of British Muslim women’s organisations • Catharina Peeck Part III: Intra-cultural interviewing: dealing with hard-to-reach participants 8 Interviewing outsiders as an in-/outsider: interviewing the socially marginalised from a marginalised position • Hwajeong Kim-Yoo 9 ‘So what do YOU want to talk about?’: interactive interviewing in hard-to-reach communities • Ida Elin Kock Part IV: The vicissitudes of interviewing ‘the same’ 10 Taboo in qualitative interviewing • Patrcyja Sosnowska-Buxton 11 The migrant interview: the researcher as migrant studying sideways • Katarzyna Wolanik Boström 12 ‘Don’t focus the star; try to catch the light’: indirect questioning in interviews to explore normative assumptions in one’s research focus • Britta Lundgren 13 Intergenerational interviewing: exploring the silences of female experiences • Angelika Sjöstedt Landén and Anna Sofia Lundgren Index