Distinguish Among Private, Personal, and Public Experiences

Interviewing relationships are also shaped by what the interviewer and participant deem are appropriate subjects to explore in the interview. In considering what is appropriate, interviewers may find it useful to dis­tinguish among public, personal, and private aspects of a participant’s life (Shils, 1959). The public aspect is what participants do, for example, at work or at school, in meetings, in classes, in offices where their actions are subject to the scrutiny of others. Interviewers tend to be most com­fortable exploring these public aspects of participants’ experience.

Participants’ private lives involve matters of intimacy, like aspects of relationships participants do not discuss with outsiders for fear of violat­ing those relationships. Each participant or interviewer may have differ­ent boundaries for what he or she considers public, personal, and private. In one interview, I asked a participant to talk more about her engage­ment, which she had mentioned briefly earlier. She said to me very di­rectly, “That’s none of your business.”

Participants also have personal lives that bridge their public and pri­vate experiences. Personal lives are of at least two basic types. The first is participants’ subjective experience of public events. Interviewers tend to feel comfortable exploring that aspect of personal experience. Indeed, that is one of the major functions of interviewing as a research method. The second is participants’ experience of events that do not occur in their public lives but in their experience with friends and family away from the workplace or school.

New interviewers tend to be less comfortable exploring experiences in this realm. They often question its relevance to the subject of their study. The dichotomy between what is personal and what is public, how­ever, is often false. What happens in people’s personal lives often affects what happens in or provides a context for their public lives and can be useful if tactfully explored in interviewing research. “May I ask,” not just as a pro forma statement but seriously meant, is a preface I often put to questions when entering troubling or sensitive areas.

Sometimes interviewers shy away from exploring areas such as death and illness because they themselves are personally uncomfortable, and they assume the participant is too. (See Young & Lee, 1996, for an ex­ploration of the interaction of the feelings of the interviewer with the interview process. Also see Hyman et al., 1954; Rowan, 1981.) If a par­ticipant mentions topics such as these, however, he or she thinks they are relevant. To ignore them or not to explore how they might relate to the subject of the research may signal to the participant that what is most im­portant to him or her is somehow not important to the interviewer. If the participant has risked mentioning a personal topic, my experience is that it is important to acknowledge it and to explore the relationship between that personal experience and the subject of the inquiry.

Source: Seidman Irving (2006), Interviewing As Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education And the Social Sciences, Teachers College Press; 3rd edition.