Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

226 Chapter 9
Presentation of Self
How should you present yourself in an interview? As a friend? As a professional?
As someone who is sympathetic or as someone who is nonjudgmental?
It depends on the nature of the project. When the object is to collect comparable
data across respondents, then it makes no difference whether you’re collecting
words or numbers—cordial-but-nonjudgmental is the way to go.
That’s sometimes tough to do. You’re interviewing someone on a project
about what people can do to help the environment, and your respondent says:
‘‘All those eco-Nazis want is to make room for more owls. They don’t give a
damn about real people’s jobs.’’ (Yes, that happened on one of my projects.)
That’s when you find out whether you can probe without injecting your feelings
into the interview. Professional interviewers (the folks who collect the
data for the General Social Survey, for example) learn to maintain their equilibrium
and move on (see Converse and Schuman 1974).
Some situations are so painful, however, that it’s impossible to maintain a
neutral facade. Gene Shelley interviewed 72 people in Atlanta, Georgia, who
were HIV-positive (Shelley et al. 1995). Here’s a typical comment by one of
Shelly’s informants: ‘‘I have a lot of trouble watching all my friends die.
Sometimes my whole body shuts down inside. I don’t want to know people
who are going to die. Some of my friends, there are three or four people a
week in the obits. We all watch the obits.’’
How would you respond? Do you say: ‘‘Uh-huh. Tell me more about that’’?
Do you let silence take over and force the respondent to go on? Do you say
something sympathetic? Shelley reports that she treated each interview as a
unique situation and responded as her intuition told her to respond—
sometimes more clinically, sometimes less, depending on her judgment of
what the respondent needed her to say. Good advice.
On Just Being Yourself
In 1964, when we were working on the island of Kalymnos, my wife Carole
would take our 2-month-old baby for daily walks in a carriage. Older women
would peek into the baby carriage and make disapproving noises when they
saw our daughter sleeping on her stomach. Then they would reach into the
carriage and turn the baby over, explaining forcefully that the baby would get
the evil eye if we continued to let her sleep on her stomach.
Carole had read the latest edition of The Commonsense Book of Baby and
Child Care (the classic baby book by Dr. Benjamin Spock). We carried two
copies of the book with us—in case one fell out of a boat or something—and
Carole was convinced by Dr. Spock’s writings that babies who sleep on their