Feminist Qualitative Interviewing: Experience, Talk, and Knowledge

Moving out of the Shadows: Accomplishing Bisexual Motherhood

“…Furthermore, insights from our study may necessarily be limited to the ethnic, educational and social class features of our sample (DeVault & Gross, 2012) or to participants' location in the relatively traditional cultural environment of mainstream motherhood in the U.K. and Republic of Ireland. Nevertheless, the variety of ways of defining bisexual motherhood expressed by the women in this group, and their varied stories over time, seem to indicate that many definitions are possible.…”

“…Examining the interview questions formed an important part of the ethical process of consenting to participate in the study and meant that participants had begun to frame their life course stories prior to telling them to the interviewer. We were mindful of the power dynamics of the research interview and wanted to give participants the opportunity to tell their lived experience as they wished and to ask questions about the researchers and the project (DeVault & Gross, 2012;Hesse-Biber, 2014). The relatively unstructured interview format gave participants the opportunity for their account to be presented to the interviewer (a White woman in her twenties) who appreciated rather than challenged their account and kept the research focus in mind when prompting or requesting additional explanation.…”

‘Emergent reconstruction’ in grounded theory: learning from team-based interview research

“…Yet interviews as a means of generating research data have been the subject of intense debate. Critiques of the dynamics of interviewing and the nature of data interviews generate, particularly arising out of feminist (De Vault and Gross, 2007) and interpretivist traditions (Atkinson et al, 2003), demand researchers acknowledge the epistemological implications of how they generate interview data.…”

“…Focusing on the dynamics of the interviewing process, feminists critiqued the traditional interview as a mechanical instrument of data collection assigning a passive role for the interviewee and a proscribed role to the interviewer, marked by asymmetric power relations and the exclusion of emotion and reciprocity (Stanley and Wise, 1993;De Vault and Gross, 2007). In a foundational contribution, Oakley (1981) proposed an approach based on a feminist ethic of commitment and egalitarianism in contrast to the scientific ethic of detachment and role differentiation between researcher and researched.…”

Sex-disaggregated indicators for water assessment, monitoring and reporting

“…As a general information-gathering approach, feminist methodologists tend to encourage "unstructured" or "semi-structured" interviews, as these resemble more natural conversations and encourage a rapport between the interviewee and interviewer. There have also been a number of studies of gendered responses to various interview settings, and women respondents tend to prefer and to provide more information, and more nuanced information, through semi-structured or unstructured approaches (DeVault and Gross, 2012;Oakley, 1981).…”