473493QRJ0010.

1177/1468794112473493Qualitative ResearchPinsky
2013

Article Q
The sustained R
snapshot: Incidental Qualitative Research

ethnographic encounters in 2015, Vol. 15(3) 281­–295

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DOI: 10.1177/1468794112473493
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Dina Pinsky
Arcadia University, USA

Abstract
The literature on qualitative methods assumes that researchers will conduct interviews in the
course of a participant-observation study but not that extensive observations of interviewees
might happen to take place during an interview study. In this article, I raise questions about
interview study methodologies, using the example of a life history interview project in which the
interviewer stayed at interviewee’s homes, met with them for meals, encountered them at events,
and kept careful field notes on all of these incidental ethnographic encounters. Reflecting on the
ambivalent status of such incidental ethnographic encounters, I argue that qualitative interview
methods suffer from the limitations of positivism because the interview encounter is privileged as
the sole source of knowledge. I call for a more flexible approach to qualitative interviews that can
accommodate and derive knowledge from the full range of encounters between the researcher
and participant.

Keywords
feminist methodology, incidental ethnography, Jewish feminists, life-history interviews,
positivism, qualitative interviews, researcher–participant relationship

In this article, I present a dilemma that I faced as a young researcher because the schol-
arly approach to research methods did not allow for the actual complexity that unfolded
in the process of my research. I use an interview study that I conducted of Jewish femi-
nist activists (Pinsky, 2005; Pinsky, 2010) to demonstrate that our current approach to
interviewing is constrained by a positivist legacy in which the interview interaction is
seen as the singular locus for data production. I call for a reframing of qualitative interview
methodologies to create the space for seeing the interview interaction as only one part
of a series of other possible interactions between researcher and participant. I am not

Corresponding author:
Dina Pinsky, Arcadia University, 450 South Easton Road, Glenside, PA 19038, USA.
Email: pinskyd@arcadia.edu
282 Qualitative Research 15(3)

referring to ethnographic interviews occurring within primarily participant-observation

based studies but, rather, qualitative interview studies in which the interview is expected
to be the main technique for gathering data. Scholars have paid considerable attention to
thinking about interactions between interviewers and interviewees as collaborative
events (Denzin, 2001; Gubrium and Holstein, 1997, 2003; Holstein and Gubrium, 1995),
yet almost no attention has been given to studies in which the interview is embedded in
ongoing interactions. The literature on qualitative interviews is devoid of guidelines for
interviewers who might happen to engage in extended interactions with their interviewees
beyond the time frame of the actual interview encounter, or what I call ‘incidental eth-
nographic encounters’.
Although my research design did not include participant-observation, throughout the
data collection phase of my research, I engaged in observational interactions through
chance encounters with interviewees, extraneous conversations, observing living spaces,
staying at homes, telephone calls for recruitment and screening, and sharing meals with
research participants. The goal of my study was to explore the social construction of
Jewish feminist identities through the use of life history interview accounts. Since my
research question was exploratory and my method was to study life story narratives
(Atkinson, 1998), I proceeded as if all interactions between myself and the interviewees
were potential sources of data and recorded extensive field notes on my interactions with
research participants both during and outside of the interview. Although I recorded field
notes to keep alongside transcripts of interview accounts, I found no instructions for how
to integrate those notes into my analysis from either the literature on interviewing or
ethics board procedures,1 both of which conceive of the interview transcript as the only
unit of data.
Here, I reflect upon the tensions of conducting interview studies at a time when the
postmodern and feminist critiques of research have yielded uneven results in the prac-
tice of qualitative researchers. I contend that our standard procedures for interview stud-
ies are still limited by the positivist model of a distanced researcher rigidly following a
predetermined research design, and thus, we are left with little room for reporting on the
actual messiness of our methodologies. This positivist legacy leads to the assumption
that interview data are pure and factual and can be abstracted from their broader context.
My aim is to expose these contradictions by sharing my research experience, to chal-
lenge the positivist carryover in interview research, and advocate accepting and examin-
ing methodological complexity as a path to improved qualitative research.
Although postmodern and feminist critiques of positivist methodologies have led to
questioning prior assumptions of qualitative research, such as static research design and
the researchers’ neutrality, privileged position, and emotional detachment from partici-
pants (Gubrium and Holstein, 2003; Harding and Norberg, 2005; Reinharz, 1992; Ribbens
and Edwards, 1998; Russell and Kelly, 2002; Scheurich, 1995), the literature has been
clearer on how to put these new approaches into practice in participant-observation
research than in interview studies. In their classic guide to reflexive ethnography,
Hammersley and Atkinson (1983) attempt to blur the distinction between positivism and
naturalism, calling for research that acknowledges that the researcher is part of the social
world being studied (pp. 234–235). In the years since this book was published, subse-
quent literature has argued for more naturalistic approaches to interview studies, while
Pinsky 283

remaining confined to instructions for the interview session itself (Abell et al., 2006;
Berg, 2009; Warren et al., 2003). However, if, as Hammersley and Atkinson (1983)
among others have claimed, the researcher is an integral part of the world she or he stud-
ies, then we must acknowledge that the relationship between interviewer and interviewee
can extend beyond the interview session.
Charles L Briggs (1986) conceives of the interview as a type of communicative
event that has become ubiquitous in our society, and yet, he contends that received
interviewing techniques are limited because researchers do not take into account the
discrepancies between their own interactional goals and those of their interviewees.
Following Briggs, I conceive of the interview as part of a communicative web between
the researcher and interview participant. While Briggs focuses on misapprehensions
occurring due to conflicting cultural backgrounds and communication styles between
interviewer and interviewee, my work shows how, in fact, shared backgrounds can lead
to a broader range of interactions informally emerging in research relationships.2 Unlike
Briggs, my intention is to challenge the notion that the interview encounter is a more
natural or effective means of providing data than other encounters one might have with
interviewees.
In this article, I will use examples from my interview transcripts and field notes to
explore how the distinction between interview and participant-observation methods is
obscured by interview studies such as mine, which include incidental ethnographic
encounters. I begin by briefly reviewing the current literature on postpositivist
approaches to qualitative interview methods. Next, I describe my own study and explain
how sharing important identities with my research participants created a sense of trust
and intimacy, which undoubtedly paved the way for more extensive interactions than is
found in many interview studies. I then provide excerpts from my field notes, which
portray ambivalence about how to consider my observations from these noninterview-
based encounters.

Scholarly approaches to qualitative interview methods:

toward the deconstruction of positivism
Research methods textbooks distinguish between different types of qualitative research.
There are separate chapters instructing students on the techniques of interviewing and
participant-observation (Berg, 2009; Bernard, 1995; Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Marshall
and Rossman, 1995). While informal conversations and semistructured interviews are
known to be part of the participant-observation process, the inverse is not true. The
expanding literature on qualitative research methods defines the interview as an isolated
event, a period of questions and answers, which is at least partially scripted (Rubin and
Rubin, 1995). Face-to-face interviews are expected to take place for a discrete period of
time unlike participant-observation, and the interview session is formalized to the degree
that it has a clear introduction and conclusion. While reports of participant-observation
studies include visual observations; novel-like descriptions of group settings, events,
physical scenery, smells and complicated descriptions of community relationships,
interview reports are based in excerpts of interviews, often more one-sided than not,
with only the words of the interviewee available for analysis (Rubin and Rubin, 1995).
284 Qualitative Research 15(3)

Research method textbooks contain chapters on qualitative interviews that instruct

students in useful techniques for asking questions, probing, and eliciting information
(Babbie, 2010; Berg, 2009; Esterberg, 2002). Interviewers are provided with strategies to
help them navigate the interactional aspect of the interview by building rapport, engag-
ing a sense of trust, and asking questions that elicit detailed responses and thus more
useful data (Berg, 2009; Esterberg, 2002; Rubin and Rubin, 1995). Although there is a
great deal of literature on interactions between interviewers and interviewees, it is
assumed that these interactions occur only within the interview session itself (Arendell,
1997; De Santis, 1980; Ellis and Berger, 2003; Enosh et al., 2008; Garton and Copland,
2010; Holmgren, 2011). However, the literature on participant-observation commonly
includes instructions on how to conduct interviews as part of ethnographic projects, since
interviewing skills are routinely needed for data collection in participant-observation
studies (Bernard, 1995; Emerson, 1983). Seen as distinct methods, there is even a body
of literature comparing the relative merits of interviewing with participant-observation
(Atkinson and Coffey, 2002; Becker and Geer, 1957a, 1957b; Trow, 1957).
For much of the 20th century, qualitative interviewing, influenced by the prevalence
of quantitative and survey research, relied heavily on standardized questionnaires and
quantifiable data (Fontana and Frey, 2008). More recently, qualitative interviewing
standards have become less structured, resulting in the prominence of the semistructured
interview, with the interviewer exercising flexibility in directing the flow of questions
(Fontana and Frey, 2008). The traditional practice of conducting semistructured inter-
views is that interviewers are expected to refrain from sharing information about them-
selves and to restrict themselves to asking questions and providing probes, in order to
avoid biasing the research process: ‘what seems to be a conversation is really a one-way
pseudoconversation’ (Fontana and Frey, 2008: 136). However, recent literature has
redefined the interview process as a more active and coconstructed interaction (Holstein
and Gubrium, 1995). Additionally, feminists and postmodernists have called into ques-
tion power relations inherent in qualitative interview methodologies (Anderson et al.,
2004; Denzin, 2001; Enosh et al., 2008; Gubrium and Holstein, 2003; Oakley, 1981;
Plesner, 2011; Reinharz, 1992; Ribbens and Edwards, 1998; Scheurich, 1995; Sprague
and Zimmerman, 2004).
The interview itself is now understood to be an interactional event in which context
and interviewer’s self-presentation matters (De Santis, 1980). For example, Herzog
(2005) claims that the choice of interview location is crucial in determining the outcome
of the interview and that social meaning is derived partly from the physical surroundings
of the interview session. Abell et al. (2006) advocate the use of strategic self-disclosure
by the interviewer to create a sense of familiarity in the interview conversation and to
engender trust in the interviewee. Hunt (1989) explains how psychoanalytic theory can
be used to understand the effects of subconscious processes on the interaction between
interviewer and interviewee. Garton and Copland (2010) show that prior relationships
between interviewer and interviewee can lead to the generation of data in unique ways.
Given the move toward examining the construction of interviews as part of a dialectical
process between interviewer and interviewee, I was perhaps more open to socializing
outside of the interview session than I would have been had I conducted this study
decades earlier. However, while this literature has spawned a worthwhile conversation
Pinsky 285

on interviewer/interviewee relations, nowhere is the prospect raised of interactions with

interviewees beyond the actual interview meeting.
To the extent that researchers have written about interactions between interviewer and
interviewee outside the question and answer period, it is about the ‘off-record’ discus-
sions that take place immediately before or after the interview. Warren et al. (2003) claim
that literature on qualitative interviewing should pay attention to ‘leave taking rituals’
that occur after the interview concludes and the audio recorder is turned off. They use a
Goffmanian framework to establish the importance of leave taking rituals for creating
meaning for both the interviewer and the interviewee. In Berg’s (2009) manual for quali-
tative researchers, he advises interviewers to ‘never begin an interview cold’ and that if
the interview takes place in a home, to look around and ask about personal objects like
books and photographs in order to set the interviewees at ease before the interview and
establish a ‘comfortable rapport’ (p. 143). Neither source explains what to do with the
observations from these interactions. These observational strategies are not intended as
data collection but rather as a tool for facilitating comfortable interview interactions
(Berg, 2009). If qualitative interviewers want advice on how to integrate the larger
context of interviewee’s lives, methodologists, like Atkinson (1998) in his life history
manual, suggest careful listening for context and meaning within the interview itself.
Despite the critiques of positivism launched by postmodernists and feminists, the
transformation of qualitative interview studies has not gone far enough. Taken together,
the literature on qualitative interviewing has not freed itself of the veil of positivism’s
influence on research. The interview is still held apart as a singular event separable from
the context of the relationship in which it takes place. Therefore, researchers and
consumers of interview studies are denied the strides made in postmodern ethnographic
methods.

My study
The purpose of my research was to examine the construction of both Jewish and feminist
identities in the participants’ life-narratives and to explore the connections that they drew
between these aspects of their identities.3 I conducted semistructured life history inter-
views, during which I asked research participants to recall major milestones in their lives
and to tell me the details of their activist histories and Jewish backgrounds. I met with
each research participant for an interview of about 2–3 hours in length. Recruitment was
mainly through listservs and snowball sampling. Since I asked people to share the details
of their life stories with me, I needed to create a sense of trust. I worked on this during
the recruitment phase, establishing a clear line of communication about the purpose of
my research and my goals for the interview. I received a very high response rate and
acceptance rate, with only a few people refusing to be interviewed and generally enthu-
siastic responses from most of the people I contacted.
During the period when I was conducting interviews, I kept a writing journal for my
reflections, electronic field notes of my various interactions in different cities, and a little
black notebook of field notes that I carried with me. If interviewers do not typically
record field notes on incidental communications and observations, why did I keep
extensive notes on my interactions with interviewees as well as my reflections on the
286 Qualitative Research 15(3)

project? First, since I had been trained by urban ethnographers who needed to record
observations of fast-paced life, I began my research prepared to keep notes on my inter-
actions and thoughts related to the project. In inductive methods of inquiry, theoretical
questions and analyses emerge from data in often unexpected ways. Recording detailed
data prepares the researcher just in case the focus of the study changes or in case some
potential gem of meaning or insight is hidden in seemingly commonplace observations.
Also, since my methodology was to conduct life history interviews, I approached the
study as if any possible detail about an interviewee’s life was relevant. I had also learned
from feminist scholars about the importance of researchers’ reflexivity in constituting
data (Bott, 2010) and thus I used my field notes as a private journal.
For some interviews, the field notes were minimal, based only on one meeting,
whereas other field notes recorded my reflections after more sustained interactions with
interviewees, such as staying at their homes or strolling around conference hotels with
them. If I only met them for the actual question-and-answer period, I recorded details
as inane as whether they hugged me, observations about their demeanors, or a list of the
books that I saw on their bookshelves. In the absence of models on how to incorporate my
field notes, I put aside my field notes when analyzing my data and writing up the results
of my study. I used qualitative analysis software to analyze the actual transcripts of my
tape-recorded interviews.

Intimacy, interviews, and the communicative web

The incidental ethnographic encounters I had with many interviewees were facilitated
by the particular circumstances of my research project. First, I was researching uncharted
territory, and my informants were invested in their stories being told. They wanted to see
the history of Jewish feminists shared. Second, perhaps since my sample comprised
former 1960s activists, many of whom came of age when communal living was popular,
interviewees were forthright in offering home hospitality and dinner invitations, and
openly sharing their lives with me. Third, they automatically felt comfortable with me
because they assumed that we shared common identities since I was accurately per-
ceived to be both Jewish and feminist (Roulston, 2006). Fourth, I was in my 20s when
conducting the interviews, and many of my interviewees had children close to my age.
This generational difference impacted the way they responded to me, with many com-
menting that I was about the same age as their children. Some interviewees even dis-
played obvious signs of caretaking behavior toward me. Finally, since I recruited many
participants through the snowball technique, they were able to connect with me through
their own social networks, which also made me seem like part of their communities. In
this section, I will discuss the latter three phenomena with evidence from my interviews
and other encounters.
My conversations with interviewees created a space for the production, manage-
ment, and communication of identities that led to a multilayered web of communication
both within and between interactions. Relying on taken-for-granted notions of what it
means to be Jewish and feminist, these conversations often functioned to establish our
similarity. Roulston et al. (2001) explore the effects of what they call, ‘cocategorical
incumbency’, or the shared group membership of interviewer and interviewee, on the
Pinsky 287

discourse constructed by both within the interview. They focus on studies in which
‘the researcher brings to the research setting her knowledge and understanding regard-
ing the topic of inquiry’ (p. 748). In my study, the cocategorical incumbency was
implicit for both Jewish and feminist identities. Never did an interviewee ask me
whether I was Jewish or feminist but merely assumed, correctly, that I was. As part of
the coconstruction of identities that takes place within the interview performance, inter-
viewers are ascribed identities (Cassell, 2005), and I was clearly imagined to share
multiple identities with my interviewees.
Along with assumptions about my identities, interviewees presumed that we shared
a common language, mostly based in our Ashkenazi Jewish backgrounds. In addition to
our common Jewish frame of reference, I also shared other identities with my inter-
viewees. Most held graduate degrees, were middle class, and were fluent in the aca-
demic and political discourses of feminism. Plesner (2011) calls for the analysis of
language use in situations where interviewers and interviewees share common profes-
sional backgrounds. She claims that in studies where the researcher ‘studies sideways
… the circulation of shared or common vocabularies subverts an orderly division
between researchers’ vocabulary and interviewees’ vocabularies’ (p. 471). This same
cooperative discursive process took place in my study because of our mutual political,
religio-ethnic, and in many cases, also academic4 identities. Likewise, Holmgren (2011)
uses the term ‘cofielding’ to refer to an interview interaction when the ‘positions of
interviewer/interviewee are similar, sometimes overlapping, and … there is a common
language and knowledge at hand in the interview situation’ (p. 366).
Interviewees regularly performed Jewishness demonstrating their knowledge of
Jewish language. Speaking ‘in code’, they used Yiddish and Hebrew phrases, demon-
strated their comfort in referring to Jewish holidays, customs, and other details of reli-
gious life, and only rarely asked me whether I understood. The underlying assumption
was of ‘cofielding’ (Holmgren, 2011), that we shared cocategorical incumbency
(Roulston et al., 2001), and thus there was no need to translate their language.
For example, when I interviewed Terry, a performer, she reflected on this mutual code
in terms of a shared sense of humor:

And so one of the refrains of the song I sing in Yiddish, is ‘Why does the tailor sew? Oh the
tailor sews and sews all week. For what? For a coin with a hole in the middle’. And yeah, see,
you understand that, you laughed. But when I translate that to non-Jewish audiences, it’s like,
‘Yeah, so?’ But this is a typical kind of Jewish irony, which is lost on so many.

Terry interpreted my laughter as a sign that I shared her cultural identity and thus humor.
In verbally demarcating the similarity between interviewer and interviewee, Terry estab-
lished a bond in the research relationship, thereby transgressing the positivist model of
an unknowable researcher.
Another example of the performance of roles and attribution of identities within my
research was made evident when I was sick with the flu during some interviews and the
interviewees played a caretaking role with me. These research participants had been
strangers to me before the interview, but perhaps a mixture of our generational differ-
ence, shared identities, and their personalities led to familiar, almost familial,
288 Qualitative Research 15(3)

interactions. One interviewee, Gerald, admonished me to change seats with him so that I
could sit in the sun, offered me Excedrin and tomato juice, and tapped my foot, repri-
manding me for sitting in a position in which my shoe touched his sofa. While, on the
surface, his performance might seem caring and hospitable, it could also be interpreted
as paternalistic and aggressive.5 Another interviewee, a physician, offered unsolicited
advice on the best types of drinks and lozenges for my sore throat. Even when I was not
sick, Naomi clearly demonstrated this motherly attitude toward me, referring to me as
‘my darling’ and patting my shoulder throughout the interview session.
Jennifer’s performance in the interview exhibited a feeling of maternal caretaking that
might seem inappropriate, especially since we had never met prior to the interview. I was
also sick with the flu when I visited her home. She can be heard on the interview record-
ing chiding me about what to eat. The following is excerpted from my field notes on my
visit to Jennifer’s home for the interview:

Jennifer took control of the situation immediately. Upon hearing my voice she exclaimed that I
sounded awful. I was extremely hoarse by that point. She admonished me to drink more water,
saying very grimly, ‘Do you know how low the humidity is here? It’s less than 10%. You have
to drink at least a gallon a day’. She sounded like she was scolding me for not taking good
enough care of myself. We went in the house and she offered me all kinds of stuff out of her
kitchen. I accepted water and an organic version of Gatorade. She did not want to start the
interview. For some reason she stalled. She insisted that we hang out for a while first. I think
that she had some stuff to do on her computer and she instructed me to walk around the house
and that she would then join me for a tour. I had the feeling that she was adamant about
maintaining control of the situation … She fed me crackers with chumus and guacamole. It
made me feel much better. I was starting to fade during the interview. In offering me choices of
food, she’d provide a choice and then say, ‘Oh no you can’t have that! It’s dairy’. When I
protested that I would eat dairy, she’d say ‘You can’t. It will make you produce more mucous!’
… When I left, Jennifer hugged me and I think she may have told me to come back and visit
and that I can always stay with her. As I was getting into the car, she apologized for pampering
me. I told her that I appreciated it. She said she hoped it wasn’t burdensome. I assured her that
I was happy to be taken care of since I was sick and that now I felt better.

These field notes reveal more than the snapshot of the interviewee’s life elicited from
answers to my interview questions. Instead, we have a more vivid picture of the inter-
viewee’s performance, which is dynamically produced in dialogue with my own.
The day after our interview session, Jennifer called me to warn me not to visit another
interviewee who was ill because her life could be threatened by my flu; I took field notes
on this conversation. When Jennifer heard my voice on the phone, she said, ‘You sound
terrible!’ and then invited me to pay her a visit at her home. Although my interviews were
confidential, I was often surprised to discover how many of my interviewees knew I had
interviewed their friends, perhaps unavoidable when researching a population with over-
lapping social networks. At the same time, I acknowledge how this sharing, which is
considered ethically questionable by Institutional Review Boards, helped explain the
invitations that I received to spend extra time with interviewees.
The above examples reveal the performance of intimacy possible in relatively
short-lived interview encounters that create the space for a sustained snapshot type of
Pinsky 289

study. My purpose in sharing these excerpts is to illustrate that the relationship between
the interviewee and respondent is more multifaceted than is apparent in the interview
transcript. In other words, our cocategorical incumbency contributed to the development
of extensive interactions.

Ambivalence and incidental ethnography

While invitations for extraneous socializing were a result of the shared identities and
performance of intimacy made evident in the previous section, some of the noninter-
view-based interactions were planned and others were spontaneous. Although the litera-
ture on interviewing does not make space for such relationships, it would have felt forced
and inauthentic to maintain a distanced stance of supposed objectivity. How could I
refuse interviewees’ invitations for home hospitality and socializing? However, as my
notes themselves verify, I still felt ambivalent about recording the details of these inci-
dental ethnographic encounters, as if I was reducing all of our pleasant social interactions
to data.
The following field notes were recorded late at night from the comfort of a guest room
in an interviewee’s house:

I feel like an anthropologist, because here I am ‘out in the field’, away from home, typing field
notes into the wee hours of the night. In fact, I am lying on a bed on the other side of the wall
from the bedroom of tomorrow morning’s interviewee and her husband. Close quarters.
Although participant observation is not officially included in my research design, elements of
it seep in when I am hosted by interviewees. In fact, any extended socializing beyond the
bounded interview becomes a form of participant-observation. Conversation becomes data
along with observations of home and style and personality. The individual becomes a full
person in a way that is not possible in a two hour time slot. So in that sense, any contact beyond
the interview itself as well as the mundane communication involved with organizing and setting
it up becomes data.

While my reflections demonstrate that I was struggling to define the role of inciden-
tal ethnographic encounters as data, I now realize that all interactions between
researcher and participant are inextricably linked and that the definition of data can
be nebulous. The entire web of communications between myself and the interviewees
comprised my study, and segmenting off our various interactions is impossible and
futile.
Life history interviews and additional interactions, such as chatting over dinner, can
be mutually informative both for researcher and participant. Jill arranged the timing of
my interviews with other women in her town and invited me to stay at her home. She
later revealed that she deliberately scheduled her own interview last because she wanted
to ‘check me out’ before divulging her life story to me. Jill had been deserted by her
former lesbian feminist community after marrying a man and had felt extremely hurt by
the betrayal. She thus was concerned about discussing her feminist past with a complete
stranger. Consequently, Jill welcomed me into her home, took me out to dinner, and
asked me about myself before our interview was scheduled, all for the purpose of vetting
me to ensure her comfort before entrusting me with her life story.
290 Qualitative Research 15(3)

Here I am reminded of Briggs’ (1986) work on the interactional goals of interviewees

differing from the goals of interviewers. For Jill and another interviewee, Nancy, the
noninterview interactions allowed them to prescreen me and broach sensitive subjects on
their own terms. Nancy invited me to stay in her house with herself and her husband. She
took me out to eat with her husband the night before I interviewed her and subtly revealed
to me that she had experienced mental illness and other emotional troubles during the
1960s and 1970s. Because of her turbulent past, she used her casual ‘off the record’ time
with me to confide in me and gauge my reactions before participating in the interview.
When the format of the interview seems awkward to interviewees, incidental ethno-
graphic encounters provide an opportunity for them to feel more in control of their inter-
actions with the researcher.
As I began to record field notes, I raised questions to myself about the utility and eth-
ics of this very act:

So what’s the importance of this type of experience? Does it really add anything to my research
in terms of empirical data? Not necessarily. However, I don’t doubt that it adds a human
component as well as a deeper understanding along the lines of an intuitive feel for my sample.
Some would call this the feminist method of social research, data collection in relationship. The
process is not one-sided. I offer the interviewees a glimpse into myself as well. How much
more relational can you get than sharing a pre-bedtime bathroom with strangers, whom you
first met in person today, and seeing the evidence of their humanness crudely in unflushed
toilets? … Then there is also the ‘data’ that arises in the casual post-interview conversation. But
I am resistant to mechanizing it by utilizing it in the same way as the interview conversation.
This doesn’t make sense in terms of methodology, because information told outside of the
formal interview in casual conversation is just as valid as that said in the interview, if not more
so in some cases.

Nonetheless, it is the relational side of me that feels betrayed when I routinize even casual
conversations … I suppose that I can get used to typing field notes on my conversations if I
think of it as keeping a journal, writing about my life and the people with whom I come into
contact. It’s not a tape and a transcription, but it’s filtered through my eyes, and from that
perspective it makes me feel less objectifying. I guess I feel as though by making data out of
getting to know someone, or the non-interview relationship interaction, I am acting as an
objectifying cold observer. I feel that there is something indecent about it. Connecting with my
interviewees on a human level feels right to me. Others might find it inappropriate to spend the
night here or to go out to dinner afterwards or to divulge personal information about myself
afterwards. However, all of that feels right to me. What doesn’t feel right is turning that personal
exchange into field notes, and by extension data. I recognize how useful these field notes are,
but I am trying here to reconcile my discomfort with them. What I need to do is to think of the
field notes in terms of the process itself rather than as a means to an end.

I did not question whether I should engage in authentic relationships with research
participants by socializing with them. Instead, I questioned the ethics of taking notes on
those interactions. My conflicted feelings arose when I recorded field notes on these
incidental ethnographic encounters, the very foundation of ethnography itself. Nowhere
Pinsky 291

in my training was I prepared for dealing with this dilemma because interview studies
are assumed to exclude participant-observation. I was ill-equipped for the unintended
consequences of extended interactions with research participants and decided to store my
field notes away rather than include them with the life history interview data that I coded
and analyzed. Absent any public discourse on incidental ethnographic encounters in
interview studies, the actual complexity and ambiguity of qualitative research designs
cannot be fully realized, and researchers will continue to experience the contradictions of
dividing self from data in rigid ways.

Conclusion
To sum up, my experience subverts the notion that the interview is the primary vehicle
for producing knowledge, yet given the received knowledge on qualitative interview
methods reviewed above, I was unwittingly trapped in that paradigm. The cultural
similarities and generational differences between myself and my research participants
engendered an atmosphere in which interactions were likely to surpass the interview
sessions. Also, I began the project critical of the traditional objectivist research stance
and open to offers of home hospitality and invitations to dine out with my interviewees.
My approach to life history interviews meant that I was interested in the feminists whom
I interviewed as complete people, and thus, I kept field notes on my interactions with
them to help me record what I learned about the contexts of their lives. However,
since the status of incidental ethnographic encounters in qualitative interview studies is
ambivalent, at best, I felt conflicted about how to manage my field notes. This article
represents my attempt to puzzle through that conflict.
Now that I have the chance to reflect upon my extended interactions with interview-
ees, incidental ethnographic encounters, and field notes, I would like to initiate a dis-
cussion with other qualitative researchers about the positivist trappings of our current
approaches to qualitative interview studies. As I have demonstrated, various false
dichotomies limit the way researchers conduct qualitative interview studies, including
the deceptive distinction between interview research and participant-observation and
also between data and personal interactions. Standard methodological training main-
tains the myth that interviews are the only way of producing knowledge in interview
studies, thereby privileging the answers to predetermined questions and disregarding
some spontaneous categories of information that are important to those being studied,
even if they do not occur to researchers. Furthermore, by privileging the interview, we
relegate other forms of communication to the status of extraneous, and not worth report-
ing. Consequently, we interviewers close ourselves off from the full powers of our own
observations and analysis.
This dualistic bind between interview and participant-observation studies is related to
Hammersley and Atkinson’s (1983) point that the distinction between positivist and nat-
uralist approaches to research is a false dichotomy. In other words, if naturalists critique
the quantitative bias of positivist social science by claiming that participant-observation
is the only legitimate method of research, then typical qualitative interview studies are
left in methodological limbo because they are not standardized and deductive like quan-
titative survey research, yet are not as naturalistic as pure ethnography. The literature on
292 Qualitative Research 15(3)

interviewing reflects this indeterminate status. On the one hand, there are the sources that
still follow a somewhat positivist approach to interviewing, calling for standardized
scripts or analyzing interview data with rigid and mechanical techniques (Miles and
Huberman, 1994). On the other hand is the literature that tries to use a more naturalistic
approach by advocating attending to the relationship with interviewees, but it treats
the interview as a discrete encounter, and thus remains bound by the positivist paradigm
(Denzin, 2001; Gubrium and Holstein, 2003; Holstein and Gubrium, 1995; Rapley,
2001).
The dilemmas raised in this article ultimately lead to questions about disclosure in
qualitative research. Researchers might not report on incidental ethnographic encounters
because they are not proscribed as part of their research. As Hammersley and Atkinson
(1983) point out, ‘… published accounts often present an unduly “tidy” version of the
research process … Such publishing practices tend to endorse a quite inappropriate dis-
tinction between “methods” and “findings”’ (p. 229). Also, Institutional Review Boards
adhere to rigid research design parameters that prohibit the inevitable unplanned out-
comes of research, such as incidental ethnographic encounters. This forces researchers to
avoid disclosing the unplanned exchanges and to label them as off-record. Consequently,
we maintain the myth of seamless interview methods and perpetuate superficial under-
standings of data. Readers remain unaware of the extent of social interactions with
research participants, and thus, we lose layers of information about the context of stud-
ies, which would assist in the evaluation of research.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. The complexity and ambiguity of applying ethical guidelines on human subject research to
ethnographic methods also informed my choices about what would be reported as data and
what to keep private (Tolich and Fitzgerald, 2006). One reason was my ambivalence about
informed consent, that if the interviewees did not provide this data within the interviews, then
it was not technically permissible to report.
2. Briggs (1986) also suggests that researchers should be aware that interviewees may have very
different purposes for their interaction and thus different norms of interaction govern each
utterance (pp. 48–49). This insight does complicate the interpretation of my field notes. For
example, when interviewees took me out to dinner, they were sometimes using that interac-
tion as a means of acquiring information about me, while their main communicative function
in the interview was to convey information to me, or at least that is the understanding behind
the research process.
3. All interviews were confidential, and I use the same pseudonyms here as in other published
work.
4. Many of my interview respondents were academics, like myself.
5. In Arendell’s (1997) exploration of the performance of gender hierarchies in her interviews with
men, she notes how touch can be used as a way to establish male dominance (pp. 360–361).
Pinsky 293

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Author biography
Dina Pinsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania,
and coordinator of the gender and women’s studies minor. Her specialties include gender, social
movements, Jewish studies, and research methods. She is the author of Jewish Feminists: Complex
Identities and Activist Lives (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Her current research projects
explore the work lives of professional dominatrices and the identities of Jews living in small towns
in the Jim Crow South.