KATHERINE: Our study of older women with gynecological cancer was inspired by my personal experience of my own mother’s diagnosis and death from ovarian cancer at age 75. Her cancer experience was always in the forefront of the study and was actually the catalyst that led Karen to suggest I pursue it. My mother’s cancer experience provided a vivid touchstone that alerted me to the fact that the women I interviewed each had a unique and powerful story to tell, and my primary role was to listen well—from the head and from the heart. My insider’s knowledge about gynecological cancer in a family context helped to sensitize me to the fact there would be many aspects of the women’s stories that would be surprising. Indeed, my own mother had gone from being a very vigorous woman who was still working full time until the day she entered the hospital to her death just a few weeks later and this transformation was a reminder that I needed to keep the women’s stories in the forefront and not lead the interviews with too many predetermined questions. Thus, I entered the field with a deep insider’s knowledge of the experience, but I also bracketed it so that the focus would be on the women’s experiences and not my own.
KAREN: I have always been drawn to understanding how older women manage chronic health conditions in every day, plus the opportunity to continue to work with Katherine, made pursing this research project a natural fit for me both professionally and personally. Although I had assumed a leading role in the Appalachian Cancer Community Network (ACCN), to engage in a study of cancer survivorship among older women was a new opportunity for me to extend my research agenda. The ACCN promoted, facilitated, and engaged in excellent cancer prevention programs and research within rural communities; yet, I often felt that the voices of older cancer survivors were not sought out or were overlooked. This project gave me an opportunity to learn from the experiences of the older women interviewed as well as to push an aging agenda within a larger network of research and practice.
LIZ: While intimacy in couple relationships is an integral topic in my work as a couple and family therapist, conducting a research study on intimacy was a new adventure. I had the privilege of embarking on this study with a dear colleague with whom I felt comfortable being vulnerable (even when it meant being emotionally exposed). Throughout the process I was humbled by the range of experiences that women, in particular, shared about a romantic loved one—accounts that were both heart-wrenching and inspirational. I was in my 30s at the time and also in an impossibly difficult romantic relationship. I resonated with some of the stories, feared others, and understood that there were certain paths that I wanted to try to avoid. Paul and I were committed to debriefing our understanding of the experiences that were shared and also made time to talk about the areas that touched us personally. This is a critical part of interrogating ourselves and attempting to uphold personal and professional integrity.
BETHANY: I really resonate with all of your reflections here. Conducting in-depth interviews across languages and cultures and with highly vulnerable and marginalized women (in this case, undocumented Central American mothers residing in an immigrant enclave in Northern Virginia) added complexity to my process as an interviewer. I found myself reliant on and trusting in my interpreter, Marlene (who became a co-interviewer) to help us gain entry, build mutuality and trust, and foster a safe space with the study participant. Over the course of the study, Marlene and I became very close and learned each other’s style. With a glance, Marlene could signal to me that I could ask certain questions or should refrain from delving too deeply and risking disconnection. We were a team, and we had to navigate our locations together. For example, Marlene was younger than most study participants and was deferential and respectful. As an older woman in my late 40s, a mother, and an outsider, I could probe about relational intimacies or other sensitive topics and Marlene could shift to my interpreter as cover for her positionality so she would not be viewed as discourteous. We often jockeyed our positions as necessary to keep moving through an interview. This process was not always purposeful, but we’ve since talked about how valuable it was to our success in securing interviews and moving through often difficult subject matter (e.g., victimization, trauma exposures, fear, loss). Marlene and I also spent time debriefing post-interviews about not only what we experienced during the interviews, but also how stories related to our own histories of trauma and loss. Marlene was instrumental in helping me better understand the nuances at play during the interview or where I may have overstepped or misunderstood a part of the conversation. During those debriefs, we supported each other as we unpacked what we were hearing and witnessing—often incredible traumas, hardships, and injustices that were heart-wrenching. This work was/is humbling and I am constantly reminded of my privilege, the strength, courage, and resilience of the women who opened their homes and hearts to us, and our common humanity.
PAUL: One thing Katherine’s paragraph stimulates me to say is that most of the qualitative research I have done has been about topics that were deeply important to me and/or to my collaborators. So I have lots of experience with bracketing my self issues in order to focus on the voices of the people interviewed and to respect and understand their realities. And I echo what Liz wrote. I could only do the study because Liz and I have collaborated for years, trust each other, and are on the same page about many things, so it was for me a safe, easy, and intellectually stimulating collaboration in which to handle my social location and self issues. Like Karen wrote about working with Katherine, I welcomed working with Liz and included in that was trusting her processes with herself and with me at relating to our personal connections with the issue and handling those connections optimally. And what Bethany wrote stimulates me to say that for me the issues of being too close or too far from the topic are entangled in gender and age. I think we only could achieve the quality of interviews we achieved because we differ in gender and age. Our differences were crucial, I think, particularly in our shared interviewing.
KATHERINE: I completely agree with the reflections and insights shared by all of you. And what I think is remarkable is that all of us are engaged in collaborative work, joining forces with others who bring both shared and distinct expertise to the research project, making it all the more valuable. For Karen and me, our shared passion in studying family relationships in later life, and particularly through the lens of older women, brought a synergy of intellectual curiosity and friendship that was so empowering. Karen’s insider’s knowledge and expertise in working with the ACCN on cancer research and programming freed me up to focus intensely with the women I interviewed.
BETHANY: In our case, I think it is essential to identify social location variables. Using a community-based participatory research approach in partnership with our advisory board members (Amigas de la Comunidad), we attempt to foster community engagement and leadership across all aspects of the project because we acknowledge that our positionality (vis-à-vis nationality, ethnicity, race, social class, educational access, legal status, opportunity structure, etc.) may not be aligned with the interests or experiences or truths of the participants or readers. By essentializing social location variables, we are searching for new meanings, shared meanings—we are hoping to facilitate voices that have yet to be heard in many family science circles—and working to reconceptualize knowings from different vantage points. This process necessitates critical consciousness raising, reflexivity, and cultural humility. Moreover, by exposing my social location and my lack of knowledge about another’s experiences, I am trying to humble myself to the community I wish to serve, to foster vulnerability, and shift power such that the study participant is owner of her story … the community is owner of their data and how it is disseminated and who benefits most pointedly.
LIZ: Bethany, I resonate deeply with your reflections regarding social location. One of the responsibilities I often ponder is how to navigate the multiple identities I hold and the identities that others might place on me, regardless of whether or not I see myself that way. For example, I identify as an economically privileged multiethnic woman of color. I was born in the United States and raised in Brazil. I hold a feminist, critical, postmodern position as a social scientist. Much of my work in the United States involves addressing social justice and mental health disparities, particularly for immigrant and refugee populations affected by traumatic stress. I have observed that the communities I work with tend to either over- or under-identify with me as a member of their own group (e.g., Latina, immigrant) leading to important ethical implications throughout the research process and ongoing community engagement efforts. The project I worked with Paul on intimacy in couple relationships did not evoke as many of these overt emic/etic issues for me, but I know they are always at play and indeed it takes skill and humility to navigate the intersectionalities.
KATHERINE: Claiming my subjective position is an essential part of the feminist research process I have practiced over many decades. Just as Bethany and Liz describe, I feel a tremendous responsibility to grapple with how my positions of privilege structure what I am able to see and hear when interviewing, observing, or analyzing others’ experiences. At the same time, staying open and raw to the ways I am vulnerable and disempowered help me to listen for strength, resilience, and new insights even in circumstances that can be demoralizing or distressing to those who have let me into their lives. One of the silent mantras that I repeat to myself as I’m interviewing others is, “what is something about my own life that I would be ashamed or upset if my participant knew?” This serves as a reminder not to make too many presumptions about the experiences of others, but to stay open to the fact that if I’m open, transparent, and empty of presumption, I might just be able to bear witness to the experiences they share with me. So, I am always willing to reveal my social locations and intersections in personal and professional settings, and typically write about my life, but it is not always necessary or warranted to do so. All that is necessary might just be the willingness to share, if asked or if the situation calls for it. Getting out of my own way has been a hard lesson to learn, and sometimes this means just staying raw, transparent, and ready, but still not making it about me. My work has been highly influenced by feminist ethnographers in the late 20th century. For example, Susan Krieger’s (1991) essay, “The vulnerability of a writer” in her brilliant book, Social Science & the Self, deconstructs the traditional scientific belief that the self is a “contaminant,” and she reveals through excruciatingly honest, even painful, prose how powerful it can be to bring one’s “self” out of hiding and into our autobiographical and scientific work. Although, as I have experienced, such revelations can make others squirm, they can also open new doors of understanding and insight.
PAUL: When Liz and I were processing each interview, analyzing our interview material, and writing we often addressed our social location issues as they related to our interviewing, our interviewees, and the material people had provided to us. There were issues of gender constantly in play, and there were also issues of sexual orientation, race, culture, privilege, and generation to explore. And yet I agree with what Liz wrote that social location issues were not as intrinsic to this study as it usually is in her research and mine. I think partly it is that with the exception of gender not many interviewees talked about their social location or addressed ours. The interviews focused on a key intimate relationship in their lives, and I think that focus often took them out of the larger society in which social location is so important. That was so even for interviewees who talked about a cross-cultural or interracial relationship. I also think that we had hopes of reaching an audience in social psychology in which issues of researcher social location are often not written about, and that limited how much we addressed social location in what we wrote.
KAREN: The response of each of you is a powerful reminder of the importance of recognizing social location as a two-way street in the research process. The information the women shared with Katherine about their experience with cancer provided the context for every aspect of their lives. As I read through the transcripts and discussed the interviews with Katherine, it was clear that even though I grew up in a hierarchical, blue collar family, I was sheltered from many of the hardships and challenges the women faced throughout their lives. Today, I sit in a position of privilege; my life is nothing like most of the women interviewed. This tension between who they are and who we are influences not just the interview process, but all aspects of the research process.
PAUL: Liz and I are not fans of the word truth, because truths seem to us to be so relative, depending on social position, language use, the limitations of knowing, social context, and much else. As we said in our chapter, we worked hard to be clear with each other about our social location(s) regarding knowing and not knowing in intimate relationships. That was important in all phases of the research, helping us to know how our experiences might stimulate or make trouble in conceptualizing, interviewing, analyzing the data, and writing. I would say there was vulnerability in doing that self-disclosure, that we could not have done much of it without a lot of mutual trust. We did not reveal our social location to people we interviewed or to readers of the book we wrote, though I imagine it was easy for them to assume we had our own relationships to the topic. I believe our decision not to reveal our social location to interviewees and readers was not about truth or vulnerability, but about how much we wanted interviewee voices to carry the narrative. But then if we were working on a different topic, we might do things very differently.
KATHERINE: I have conducted qualitative interview studies for four decades, and one insight I have over these many years is that my revelations to participants about my own experiences are not all that important to their willingness and ability to share their stories with me. Rather, I have found that participants are more interested in telling their own stories, and my job is to listen, and to use my own experience as a way to anticipate the kinds of questions and probes that will enable their own deep storytelling. It does help, however, to gain access to a community and to the details of a person’s life story, if I have been sensitized through lived experience to the issues I’m asking participants to talk with me about (e.g., loss of a loved one, family caregiving, health crisis, lesbian motherhood, divorce), but once in the field, the details of my own experiences of loss, change, trauma, and the like must fade in order to make room for me to bear witness to another’s perceptions and experiences about what has happened to them. One of the lessons I have learned from the aftermath of my own son’s death as a young man is that there are no predictably right words that someone else can say to me that might be helpful in the moment, and so, my own social location, in that moment, as a bereaved parent, especially if I am interviewing someone who has suffered a great loss as well, is to put my own identity and experiences aside and pay attention to them. In conducting data analysis, I journal fiercely throughout the process, because my own emotional reactions are a constant intrusion on reading through transcripts and sorting through data. Ultimately, sharing the products of data analysis—with my co-analysts, with live audiences, and throughout the publication process—are some of the best checks on imposing my own narrow slice of understanding onto the topics I study.
LIZ: Paul captured our sentiments about truth statements in social science research and how we approached sharing our social location with participants on the intimacy project. I concur with Katherine about participants mostly being interested in sharing their stories, with less interest in how we might present ourselves. This leads me to reflect on another dimension related to action-based social justice research. I have experienced underrepresented and vulnerable communities become increasingly sophisticated in screening potential collaborators and holding scholars accountable for their work. It is impossible for me to completely disentangle the expectations I bring to the table versus what I perceive the communities I work with to expect from me, but I believe it is critical to be explicit about one’s motivations for conducting research with vulnerable populations, even when it means a commitment to a longer engagement process upfront to enhance the likelihood of shared expectations for how research outcomes might further their own interests.
BETHANY: As I read through your responses, I have been pushed to think about my social location versus (and) my connection to the topic of study. In conducting interviews and analyzing data, I agree with Paul and Liz about the importance of being critically conscious and reflexive about my social location and my ability to bracket my experiences and grow understanding, particularly around difference. How I am perceived by others, how I perceive others, and how my social location may help or hinder trust-building are all part of the dance or the art of the interview. I find myself working hard to negotiate those spaces to build authentic human connections across social locations. As Liz notes, particularly in social justice work, we must hold ourselves accountable (as communities increasingly hold us accountable) to these critical and just processes so we do not replicate color/gender/class-blind, decontextualized, or misaligned research practices that do more harm than good.
Yet, as I read Katherine’s words, I realized that I hold a belief that my connection and my own experience to a topic of interest (e.g., trauma, loss, resilience) can be transcendent. As Katherine shared, I too bring my history of trauma and loss into our interviews—not verbally, not by retelling my story—but by connecting to the topic and opening up to vulnerability while bearing witness to and taking in another’s telling of their story sans judgment, and feeling my way through probes with sensitivity, compassion, and empathy. As with Katherine’s process, I hope that our collaborative data analyses and dissemination processes have resulted in deeper understanding, in this case, of undocumented immigrant women’s lived experiences.
A few references that have been helpful to my thinking are Pollner’s (1991) call for radical reflexivity and Tervalon and Murray-Garcia’s (1998) piece on cultural humility. I also appreciate and have been challenged in a good way by Smith’s (2012) work on decolonizing methodologies.
KATHERINE: One responsibility I surmise that we all share is that our own social locations must be in service to the people we are working with and whose lives we are studying. I agree that our motivations for doing research must be examined and held up to scrutiny. For me, a core part of this examination process occurs through writing—including reflexive memos about issues that arise during interviewing, and through the publication process of subjecting my interpretations to the scrutiny of peers, who are often much harder to convince than those whose experiences I’m actually describing. What keeps me going, though, is that the research I do must matter—not just to myself, but also to be in service to the people whose experiences I’m trying to shed new light on. Conducting research that matters is another feminist principle that has infused my work for decades.
KAREN: I really do not have much more to offer. Your comments resonate with me and my view of who I am as a researcher and my responsibility to others when I take on that role. As each of you have commented in one way or another, it is the voices of interviewees that are of utmost importance and need to be clearly and accurately heard throughout the process of interviewing, analyzing, and disseminating our findings. As I tell my students, of course I like the accolades that go along with publishing our research findings and advancing the study of aging, but it is when, after giving a public lecture, an old woman comes up to me and asks, “How did you know my story?” that I know that my research does indeed make a difference. And, that is what it is all about!
Krieger, S. (1991). Social science & the self: Personal essays on an art form. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Pollner, M. (1991). Left of ethnometholology: The rise and decline of radical reflexivity. American Sociological Review, 56, 370–380.
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Zed Books.
Tervalon, M., & Murray-Garcia, J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 9(2), 117–125.