Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

In-depth interviewing
much they talked about each. Even so, we both knew that the
expectation was that they would talk about their experience of
sexual abuse, so the research was constructed in such a way that
child sexual abuse was brought into focus. Nevertheless, I encouraged
the women to talk about those aspects of their lives that they
considered relevant to the study rather than just the sexual abuse.
This approach seems to have worked to the extent that the women
did talk about other aspects of their lives and some in fact volunteered
that other sorts of abuse, such as verbal abuse and
putdowns in childhood, had had a more lasting impact on their
sense of self than the sexual abuse.
Given the focus on the women’s stories, as they wished to tell
them, I chose a deliberately reflective style of interviewing. As far
as was possible, my questions flowed from or built upon a
woman’s previous comments. They were often clarificatory in
nature. Sometimes I asked questions that led women to state what
was, in the context of our discussion, obvious. There were times
when an appropriate therapeutic response would have been an
empathic nod. In the research context, I asked the naive questions
so participants could actually state what was implicit, but
unspoken.
Except when clarification was needed, I took the approach of
letting the women talk until they had exhausted what they had to
say on a particular topic. There were times when what a woman
was saying did not seem, to me, to be immediately relevant to her
experience of sexual abuse. At these times, I resisted the temptation
to cut in and inevitably the connections the woman was
making between the various aspects of her life story became clear.
There were other times when the women’s comments related
directly to things I wanted to explore further. While I did not want
to break their train of thought and thus risk ‘losing’ what they
were about to say, neither did I want to ‘lose’ the new avenue for
discussion. I managed this by jotting down brief notes, no more
than a word or two, about leads to follow-up later. More often
than not, the woman came to the point I had jotted down herself
later in the interview. It was only towards the end of the interviews
that I clarified any remaining points.
Not curtailing the flow of what the women had to say also
involved respecting their silences. The women differed considerably
in the time they took to collect their thoughts. I needed to be
sensitive to when a silence was a working silence and when it
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