Presenting a ‘Self’ in Interviews

When interviewees cannot be placed into a category of 'dispossessed' or 'powerful', and especially when they express views you abhor or hold status positions well above yours (which does not necessarily mean that they are powerful within the problematic being studied), the relation between researcher and subject becomes more problematic...My first concern was to gain access, and thus while I did not claim to be born-again, I most certainly did not present myself as a Jewish, lesbian, socialist feminist. I was not engaging in covert research, but neither did I wish to jeopardize the project. I did not lie, but I did not tell the whole truth - I said I was a sociologist of law (which, from their

perspective, was bad enough)... (Herman 1994:14/15).

Like Didi Herman, who interviewed members of the New Christian Right in Canada concerning their attitudes towards issues of lesbian and gay equality (Herman 1994), I found myself in the position of an openly gay researcher

approaching large and bureaucratic social work organizations, often interviewing social workers whose views I found objectionable and who felt perfectly at ease to make homophobic comments despite knowing that I was gay. However, like

Herman, my concern was to gain access to local authorities and indeed to just those social workers who had reservations about lesbians and gay man as foster or adoptive carers.

For this reason, issues of the presentation of ‘self’ for me as a researcher were of prime importance and worked on many different levels. In order to gain access to the local authorities, I presented myself as a genuine, serious academic

researcher, interested in the policies and practices of the organization: I used University letter-headed paper and described my project and willingness to maintain confidentiality.

Doing the interviews raised issues about how much of my ‘self’ I should divulge to interviewees, and indeed how I was presenting myself to them. I certainly formed impressions of them, and positioned them in certain ways, and no doubt they did so in relation to me. My approach to the interviews, even where the social workers expressed what I considered to be anti-gay remarks, was to tell them that I was interested to hear what they had to say. I did not discuss my own views about lesbian and gay fostering and adoption except where they asked me questions back and here I felt that I should answer them (Oakley 1981). Where I disagreed with what was being said, I let them express their views and would then present an alternative argument to see what they made of it. Nevertheless, I also did the reverse; where social workers expressed views in line with my own I would present opposing arguments to them.

This revolves around the idea that I was being partly ‘covert’ in my approach (Bulmer 1982; Fielding 1982); because I did not say to each and every social worker, ‘I am a gay man, and my views about lesbian and gay fostering and adoption are...’ it has been assumed that I was deceiving my interviewees on some level8. Such self-presentation was also an issue for Herman (personal communication 1995), but in both our cases ethical concerns meant that we felt unable to actively deceive research subjects. For Herman, this meant that she used techniques of avoidance/not answering questions fully, in order to obscure her personal point-of-view, otherwise her subjects would refuse to speak to her (Herman 1994:15; personal communication 1995):

I thus felt uncomfortable leading them to believe, through a

sympathetic tone or smile, that I might be supportive of their cause. On the other hand, I was also motivated by an activist concern to acquire useful information, and in this sense the research

resembled the covert model. To do this, I needed to establish some kind of trust or empathy during the interviewing process. And yet I found this was achieved at a personal cost, particularly when some individuals expressed the most vicious perceptions of lesbian and

gay sexuality. (Herman 1994:15).

8 _{This was commented upon at my formal upgrading panel from MPhil to PhD, where a comment}

was made that one of my interviewees ‘didn’t really know what he was saying’, as though I had trapped him into making homophobic statements. I have also found that this idea is often raised when I have presented my research in academic settings.

I also felt that, were I to present all my views on lesbian and gay fostering and adoption to each and every potential interviewee, this might prevent those who disagreed with me from coming forward. Nevertheless I did not actively ‘deceive’ them; I made my views clear when asked and I told them that I was a gay man. What is more interesting to me is the assumption that, where a social worker expressed homophobic views to me, I must have ‘duped’ them into doing so. This is certainly not how I experienced the interviews; those social workers who expressed homophobic views seemed to me to feel only too secure in doing so, at least because they were relying upon dominant discourses concerning

sexuality. The view that I, as the researcher, was always in a position of power, able to dupe my interviewees into making statements they did not really mean, does not hold for me here. Instead I felt that they positioned me in a less powerful position, as gay, as a researcher, as someone who did not work in fostering and adoption, in comparison to them, heterosexual, working in a large organization of which I knew relatively little, and experienced in fostering and adoption work. At other times, however, the reverse was true; they positioned me as an ‘academic with all the answers’ who might ridicule or catch them out. Notions of power here then shift across the course of a research project and across the course of an interview (Phoenix 1994). But this also brings me back to the question of ‘shapeshifting’, for what is a truthful presentation of ‘self’ in

Very little was said directly to me and when I tried to be friendly there was a noticeable disposition to fend me off...The men would crowd in and buy soft drinks and woof at me, the stranger, but I knew I wasn’t getting on...Then one day after Cliffert Ulmer, Babe’s son, and I had driven down to Lakeland together he felt close enough to tell me what was the trouble. They all thought I must be a revenue officer or a detective of some kind. They were accustomed to strange women dropping into the quarters, but not in shiny gray Chevrolets...The car made me look too

prosperous. So they set me aside as different...I took occasion that night to impress the job with the fact that I was also a fugitive from justice, ‘bootlegging.’ They were hot behind me in

Jacksonville and they wanted me in Miami. So I was hiding out. That sounded reasonable. Bootleggers always have cars. I was

taken in. (Hurston 1935:60-61).

Zora Neale Hurston used the representation of ‘selves’ throughout her life and work (Hemenway 1977), and in Mules and Men (Hurston 1935) and also Dust

Tracks on a Road (Hurston 1942), she describes how she was initially positioned

as an outsider by the people of Eatonville - the place where she had grown up - when she went back there to collect and research black folklore. She felt that they did not trust her initially - “The glamor of Barnard College was still upon me.

I dwelt in marble halls...” (Hurston 1942:174-59) and so, in order to gain trust, she presented another ‘self’ to them, and, in typical ‘Zora style,’ this self was pure fabrication, for she certainly was not a fugitive or bootlegger.

This example illustrates quite neatly some of the problematics involved in

suggestions that the researcher-interviewer ought to present an honest self to the interviewees. It is impossible for the interviewer and interviewee to ever fully ‘know’ each other during the process of an interview; instead, each gleans small pieces of information about the other and begins to position that other

accordingly (Silverman 1989). The idea that I could have presented a complete and honest self to my interviewees seems to me to be impossible, but also based upon the idea that there is a single, essential self that could be so neatly

summed up.

The social workers made sense of me, positioned me according to certain information about me (Edwards 1993), but were not duped by me into making false statements. Indeed, if it can be argued that I was ‘duping’ the social workers into making false statements, then it can equally be argued that they were

‘duping’ me, presenting more flattering versions of their practice, or what has been called ‘managing impressions of themselves’ (Lee 1993:75).

9 _{All page numbers for Dust Tracks on a Road refer to the 1986 edition published by Virago}

An ‘Institutional Ethnography’

Having described the interview as ‘method’, I now wish to return to its

methodological implications. I used the interview within the context of conducting what Dorothy Smith has termed an ‘institutional ethnography’ (Smith 1987:160), and I show how I used this analytically in chapter four. This is a research

methodology that explicates the institutional relations that determine the

everyday worlds in which the social workers were practising. Smith argues that an institutional ethnography should uncover the ‘relations of ruling’ which govern everyday social relations and practices. The relations of ruling are forms of consciousness, created via the construction of practices and discourses, which belong to organizations and to those discourses therein (Smith 1987:3) Thus the relations of ruling are the dominant ways of making sense of our everyday

worlds; here, the dominant ways that the categories ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ are made sense of within fostering and adoption practice, and they are also the practices which sustain and reproduce such versions of the world; here, the assessment practices which continue to reproduce certain representations of the categories ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’. Thus an institutional ethnography analyses discourse in order to investigate what are constituted as ‘norms’.

Methodologically, an institutional ethnography must begin in the everyday

practical reasoning of individuals, and it is for this reason that I used the interview to understand how the social workers theorized about lesbian and gay

applicants. An institutional ethnography should therefore analyse how the work done by the social workers is constitutive of their everyday worlds, and how these practices sustain institutional processes. Where such practices are performed by many social workers, and/or repeatedly so, then they can be understood to be the social relations of ruling governing such practices (Smith 1987:166). I have summarised Smith’s (1987) methodology in diagrammatic form: