Page 44 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Talk, tea and tape recorders 37
my ability to ask what I perceived might be more difficult questions, or to
press the interviewees to expand on answers when they adopted defensively
short answers or where there were inconsistencies. At the same time, one
could argue that it doesn’t make good research practice to antagonise, upset
or irritate interviewees. An example of how my reticence led to gaps in the
material occurred in the case of Helen, who had two young daughters, one
about 6 months old and the other almost 3 years old. In the first interview,
Helen told me that these children both had the same ‘mixed-race’ father,
who was not the person she was now living with and who was bringing up
the children with her. In the second interview, when she was giving a nar-
ration of her life, she presented her current relationship as beginning soon
after university with no suggestion that it had ever been interrupted. Given
this strong narrative of a single relationship, I felt that it would be raising
a sensitive issue to ask about the father of her children, and in this case felt
unable to broach the question.
Although there were times when I felt somewhat inhibited in the inter-
view, the interviewee may equally feel inhibited or unable to refuse to answer
a question that is put directly. Nonetheless, there are many ways to resist or
divert questions in such a way that they become difficult to ask again. I
would not like to suggest that this was a big problem in the research. What
was remarkable to me was the extent to which interviewees were willing
to open themselves to questioning and to share confidential information,
different experiences and their sense of themselves. At the same time, some
of the resistances and silences are in and of themselves important to this
research. Indeed, Chapter 5, ‘Seeing, talking, living “race”’, shows how this
happened around the subject of ‘race’ itself. But the point I want to make
here is that power or control at this stage could be argued to be relatively
equally balanced. This stands in marked contrast to the situation once the
fieldwork is completed and the analysis begins. Therefore, it was perhaps
particularly appropriate that Rosemary (as mentioned earlier) reserved a
sense of deference to the tape-recorder. She was perhaps aware that I would
be the person listening to the interview, but the question was what I, as the
distanced listener and researcher, rather than the woman sitting in her living
room, would make of and do with what she said.
There have been many claims made within feminism for the emancipa-
tory potential of qualitative research (for example see Oakley 1981). How-
ever, these formulations can be problematic where they lack analysis of
the shifting dynamics of power in a research process. They also potentially
overemphasise the development of a relaxed rapport, even friendship, with
research subjects, which ignores divisions and differences between women
(those who validate interviewing in these terms generally assume that it will
be women, not men, who are interviewed). In addition, they fail to address
the situation in which the researcher is interested in researching an area that
the interviewees may not consider significant or, more importantly perhaps,
where there is a need to analyse the interview in a way with which the inter-