Page 43 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

36 Talk, tea and tape recorders
and influenced the questioning and responses. In addition, class influenced
the style of interviewing and responses. Middle-class interviewees tended
to produce longer replies to the questions and be more likely to adopt a
narrative style where they might have strayed off the immediate focus of the
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question. Working-class interviewees tended to reply more briefly, leading
to a more conventional question and answer session in which there was
less scope for the concerns of interviewees to emerge. Class was certainly
present in the interviews with middle-class women, in contributing to the
assumption of certain shared experiences, views and positions that made the
interview more relaxed. This would have worked in a similar way to shared
white identities. For instance, in the following extract, Madeleine referred to
our common middle classness:

I think class is really, class is one of those things. I don’t know if you
had this experience when you were growing up, but class is one of those
things which people use in arguments against you, like ‘you can’t have
an opinion on this because you’re middle class’.
(Interview 9)

This is not to say that there weren’t differences between myself and other
middle-class interviewees. As mentioned above, interviewees would have
surmised my class position from my accent, my educational status, my modes
of speech and ways of being. But they also knew, generally without the need
to question, that I did not, at the time, have children. While I obviously con-
veyed this through the way in which I phrased and asked questions, I admit
that I found their ability to assume my childless status rather mysterious. I
do not know what assumptions they made about my sexuality, although it
is likely that the majority of the interviewees assumed I was heterosexual.
Coupled with the fact that I was often younger than the interviewees, the
fact that I myself was not a mother put them in a position of explaining their
experiences to me. There was also a difference in financial position between
myself and several of the interviewees, which I was certainly conscious of
and they may also have been. For instance, on one occasion, an approach to
the co-ordinator of a private nursery in Clapham turned into an attempt on
her behalf to recruit me to do babysitting for her. Of course ‘middle class’ is
far from a homogeneous category, and minor distinctions become oversig-
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nificant in the context of social class. I did not practice middle classness (or
womanhood) in the same way as many of the middle-class interviewees or
even necessarily share their common knowledge.
These differences make questions of power and control in the research
process more complex than is sometimes suggested. It could be argued that,
at the time of the interview, it is the interviewee who has the most control
over the situation. As a researcher, I felt a deep sense of gratitude that some-
one had not only consented to give me an interview, but had given their time,
invited me into their house and were willing to talk frankly. This inhibited