Qualitative Interviewing as an Embodied Emotional Performance

By D. Ezzy. 2010

181 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The article argues that the emotional framing of interviews plays a major role in shaping the content of interviews. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jessica Benjamin and Luce Irigaray, the article describes how interviews can be experienced as either conquest or communion. Qualitative researchers typically focus on the cognitively articulated aspects of the interview and elide the significance of their own and the interviewee’s, emotions. A reanalysis of two previous qualitative interview studies is used to illustrate the difference between interviews experienced as conquest or communion. The article argues that all interviews are emotional and embodied performances and that good interviewing is facilitated by a reflexive awareness of, and engagement with, the emotional, embodied, and performed dimensions of the interview.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a7cab12a7e719652111fb421ef8dac76c7d9c1f5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. G. Wiltshire
2. A. Irvine
3. N. Ronkainen

In Sociology and Political Science

1. G. Wiltshire
2. A. Irvine
3. N. Ronkainen

Citations in the corpus

• Duration, Dominance and Depth in Telephone and Face-to-Face Interviews: A Comparative Exploration (2011, background): “Ezzy (2010) counted the number of words attributed to researcher and participant in interview transcripts and Roulston et al. (2003) counted the number of lines of the transcript attributed to researcher and respondent.”
• A realist approach to thematic analysis: making sense of qualitative data through experiential, inferential and dispositional themes (2021, background): “Making a judgement about strength is a complex issue potentially involving the researchers’ acute perceptions about the strength of feeling in situ if the researcher undertaking the analysis also conducted the interview (Ezzy 2010).”