This article identifies practices in qualitative interviews that evoke research participant reflexivity and change. By engaging interviews in a dialogic manner, researchers can encourage participant perspective-taking and non-judgmental involvement that can lead to flickers of transformation. The study draws on empirical material from three different projects to locate critical incidents of dialogic interviewing. We propose a typology of dialogic interviewing strategies that accompany reflexivity—namely, (a) probing questions, (b) member reflections, and (c) counterfactual prompting. These strategies illustrate the transformative power of dialogic interviewing and serve as a guide for researchers who desire their interviews to not only be methods for gathering knowledge but also methods for intervention and critical reflection.
In January of 2018, after decades of sexual abuse of hundreds of athletes under his medical care, Larry Nassar faced 156 of the women he victimized when they testified at his sentencing hearing and detailed the abuse. In the wake of the Nassar verdict, gymnastics and other youth sports organizations have come under fire for abusive practices that victimize young people. Scholars have recently argued for an approach to understanding sexual violence as an organizational, rather than individual phenomenon. The power organizations have to inflict violence on their members requires an understanding of the increased role of organizations in our decision-making and the shaping of our values and desires. Through an analysis of testimonies submitted by the women who were victimized by Nassar as children, I argue that violence was intentionally deployed as an organizational strategy by USA Gymnastics. Abusive organizational practices traumatized girls, leading them to recalibrate their expectations for what was normal and acceptable, ultimately facilitating their abuse. I propose ‘high stakes organizations’ as contexts particularly vulnerable to violent organizational practices. I argue that in these high stakes organizations, trauma is likely to be deployed as a strategy for organizational commitment, further fostering precarity in modern organizations.
This article examines the case of the American terrorist Colleen LaRose, known as ‘JihadJane’. By employing social theories and psychological approaches to terrorism, the authors argue that the online radicalization of marginalized individuals like LaRose must be understood through personal histories and existing social and cultural tensions, rather than the seductive power of extremist ideologies. Therefore, in the age of new media, countering the emergence of such individuals requires societies to face challenges akin to preventing other forms of domestic extremist violence, such as school shootings.
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