‘It's great to have someone to talk to': the ethics and politics of interviewing women

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Abstract
Janet Finch’s chapter explores some of the ethical problems involved in interviewing women. Drawing on her own work in which she interviewed clergy wives, and mothers involved in playgroups, she looks at the development of trust in the interview situation, and the exploitative potential of this. As she points out, if you are a woman sociologist, reasonably skilled in the arts of qualitative research and semi-structured interviewing, it is the easiest thing in the world to get women to talk to you. While traditional methods textbooks encourage the development of rapport (while deploring any ‘over-rapport’), there is little discussion, as Oakley (1981) and McRobbie (1982) have indicated, of the difficulties that can arise from this. Daniels (1967) in an illuminating discussion of the low-caste stranger in social research discusses one set of problems which can arise from the social relationships we have with those we interview. Janet Finch, in a rather different situation, discusses another. In the case of clergy wives, she was interviewing her peers; in the case of the playgroup mothers, women more powerless than she — an ambiguous situation as she rightly recognises. The mechanisms that relatively powerful individuals may be able to use when being researched discussed in Scott’s chapter were not open to Finch’s playgroup respondents. As Sjoberg (1967, p. xii) suggests, the ethical dilemmas in this sort of situation cannot be achieved through the repetition of the formula ‘I am objective’. What we must do is to examine the impact of ethical and political decisions on social research.

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