Essentials of Qualitative Interviewing (review)

This is a textbook for people in healthcare fields who are beginners in using the interviewing method to gather data for their research. The assumption is that this research data can be codified. It is not an adequate guide for oral historians. In fact, the author seems unaware of publications about oral history and so her focus is narrow. A quick search of research and discussion about the in-depth interview by practitioners in fields outside of sociology and nursing would have added some important insights and appreciation of the strengths of this research method.

Now that I have plopped that contention down on the table, is there something in-depth interviewers can nevertheless gain from this book? On making choices for a list of narrators, Olson offers a candid and informative discussion in her chapter subsection "Deciding Whom to Interview." To illustrate her points, she draws from her interviews with Canadian women concerning breast self-examination. She points out the difficulties of formulating criteria for inclusion in any interviewing project (25-26). Then she uses as her example a hypothetical study on the process of becoming a mother. She suggests the questions the researcher might think would be appropriate to ask: Do you include women who are pregnant for the first time? How about women who became mothers through adoption? Or become surrogate mothers through the foster care program? Or women who have lost babies through miscarriage or abortion? Olson then asks, provocatively, "Are all these women mothers?" (25). Adroitly she convinces her reader that choice of narrators is important enough to think it through carefully.

Olson's discussion about "Interviewing Individuals from Vulnerable Populations" is a sensitive treatment of this subject. She chooses three vulnerable groups out of many to focus on: children, older adults, and the sick. With children, Olson considers researchers' observations, for example, on interviewing small children alone, in a group of children only, or with parents. The conclusion is that although involvement of parents can be helpful, you should talk only to children if you want children's views unprompted by others (29-30). Helpful advice about interviewing narrators who are ill includes considering phases of an illness. Someone may not feel like talking one week, but the next week be feeling better and want to talk. She reminds the reader that medications may interfere with memory or speech and that trauma may leave a person unable to remember (31).

Olson brings up a technique that health professionals use that shows the difference in the kind of interview she has in mind from that of an oral historian: the use of "shadowed data." She defines "shadowed data" as "data obtained by interviewing someone who knows the participant well" (32). She refers to a process whereby one narrator describes the experience of an individual who cannot tell his or her own story. Biographers do this all the time, interviewing any available person who knew the subject, placing that narrator in a context, and recording his or her reactions to the subject, thinking about the way these reactions impact the portrayal of the subject. I can understand in health research how some important knowledge of the situation can be gleaned only from testimony of a close observer when the subject is unable to speak. Helpful as this secondary testimony may be, it does not convey the full power of the first-person narration of an oral history interview, with all its authority, nuanced expressions, revelations of feelings, and judgments. An interview of "shadowed data" is not a first-person account of the patient's suffering. It is a first-person account only of the observer's reactions. Olson does indicate an awareness of the limits of "shadowed data": "Living an experience is different from observing it" (32).

Among other discussions that will be troubling to oral historians is Olson's assumption about anonymity: "It is customary in quantitative studies to tell each participant that the information provided will be confidential and that his or...