Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Interviewing: Unstructured and Semistructured 223
dent. If you probe those people for information when they say, ‘‘I don’t
know,’’ you tempt them to make something up just to satisfy you, as Sanchez
and Morchio (1992) found. Sometimes, you just have to take the ‘‘don’t
know’’ for an answer and cut your losses by going on to someone else.
The Ethics of Probing
Are these tricks of the trade ethical? I think they are, but using them creates
some responsibilities to your respondents.
First, there is no ethical imperative in social research more important than
seeing to it that you do not harm innocent people who have provided you with
information in good faith. The problem, of course, is that not all respondents
are innocents. Some people commit wartime atrocities. Some practice infanticide.
Some are HIV-positive and, out of bitterness, are purposely infecting
others. Do you protect them all?
Are any of these examples more troublesome to you than others? These are
not extreme cases, thrown in here to prepare you for the worst, ‘‘just in case.’’
They are the sorts of ethical dilemmas that field researchers confront all the
time.
Second, the better you get at making people ‘‘open up,’’ the more responsible
you become that they don’t later suffer some emotional distress for having
done so. Informants who divulge too quickly what they believe to be secret
information can later come to have real regrets and even loss of self-esteem.
They may suffer anxiety over how much they can trust you to protect them in
the community.
It is sometimes better to stop an informant from divulging privileged information
in the first or second interview and to wait until both of you have built
a mutually trusting relationship. If you sense that an informant is uncomfortable
with having spoken too quickly about a sensitive topic, end the interview
with light conversation and reassurances about your discretion. Soon after,
look up the informant and engage in light conversation again, with no probing
or other interviewing techniques involved. This will also provide reassurance
of trust.
Remember: The first ethical decision you make in research is whether to
collect certain kinds of information at all. Once that decision is made, you are
responsible for what is done with that information, and you must protect people
from becoming emotionally burdened for having talked to you.
Learning to Interview
It’s impossible to eliminate reactivity and subjectivity in interviewing, but
like any other craft, you get better and better at interviewing the more you