I have been listening to the recording of the fifty lifestory interview and I am perplexed. The interview followed a very different pattern compared to the others. First of all, the interviewee has a very different life circumstances and experience in comparison to the others. However, the recording was less like a lifestory and more like a regular interview session. From the recording, I discovered that I was the one in charge of the session, I was asking a lot of questions and giving what in my opinion is too many prompts. This is very different from the previous interviews, where the interviewees were talking non-stop, narrating incidences, experiences and giving their own opinions on issues. In the previous interviews, my questions and comments were predominantly to guide and prompt and came up at strategic points of the narration.
I decided to scrap this interview, but was worried because I wondered what went wrong, and what can I learn from this ‘wrongness’? So I decided to read up some more on life story interviewing. Just early this morning (at about 2a.m) I came across a review of Robert L. Miller’s (2000) Researching Life Stories and Family Histories book. It enlightened me about what was happening in that recording, how it turned that way and even a name for that ‘method’ of life story interview. Miller explained that “In the narrative approach, the researcher looks at the oral document to find out how the interviewing situation and interaction with the interviewer has shaped the testimony”. This got me thinking about the situation in which this recording took place. Firstly, we could not hold this recording in the same office I used for the other recordings, because the office was closed despite having arranged to be there. So, I apologized to my interviewee and thought to cancel the session for that day, when my interviewee suggested another location.
The other location turned out to be a community centre in a public park in Yeoville, one of the so called dangerous zones in Johannesburg. Seriously, I thought of immediately refusing thinking of all the alarming stories that I have heard, but then with the interviewee willing, I could not disappoint him. So we left for the centre, with my heart literally in my mouth – I was scared stiff. On getting to the centre, I got permission to use one of the empty public rooms for our discussion. My God! the room was freezing cold, with the possibility that anybody could walk in at any time – and in my imagination, point a gun at us to rob us. The second main difference in this recording is with my interviewee. He is an Ivorien that is fluent in French and speaks English. We had the interview in English language, but he told me at the beginning of the interview, that he could only manage fairly with discussions in English. So he was talking more in terms of single sentences in response to specific questions.
Thirdly, the story and background of this interviewee is very different from the horrific and very difficult stories that I was used to hearing from the others. The main question on my mind while talking with him was “what is this young man doing on the street of Johannesburg?” In the recording I discovered that, the whole discussion seems to be around this same question. So, with this background, it makes sense why this interview session went this way from the others. I will not scrap it, I will leave it and add it to my data; it is part of the whole picture of methodology! Still it is amazing to see how the surrounding and interviewer’s feeling can be reflected in the data. This has made me more conscious of the place I will hold the subsequent interviews and how to prepare myself for it. Surely, as I continue to do a fast analysis on the data I already have, it is expected that the subsequent interview sessions will be an ‘improvement’.