Abstract
The interview is the basic tool of qualitative research. There is a lot of technical writing about interviews, but very little about where you interview and what it says about you or them. Yet this is part of building a more complete picture of the individual beyond being a mere ‘subject’. Interview location can convey power relationships or knowledge and the choice of location affects the knowledge gained by that interview. The location itself should be seen as part of knowledge interpretation and itself plays a part in knowledge creation as a cultural product and producer. Reading a room is a skill in itself, and choice of location can be critical in setting a context for open or closed discussion. Place matters.
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Notes
- 1.
The irony here being that a book called Failing in the Field does not say all that much about the actual field.
- 2.
This is undoubtedly because Ecker’s excellent paper discusses the issues with regard to interviewing homeless and vulnerable people in the USA, where there are clear issues about authority and power.
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Jackson, P. (2021). Interview Locations. In: Mac Ginty, R., Brett, R., Vogel, B. (eds) The Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46433-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46433-2_7
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