Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science

In the preface of my book, Rivalry and Revenge, I wrote about my family. The story of my ancestors, and especially that of my paternal grandmother, had brought me to study the Spanish Civil War when I went to graduate school. I wrote that preface before sending the book to press because I felt compelled to say a few words about my background to the readers, who would later find a rather analytical and perhaps “cold” approach to the bloody civil war that affected my country in the 1930s. I think the difference between the preface and the rest of the book illustrates the two faces of a researcher who decided to study a case that felt very close to home.

I had been nervous about studying the Spanish Civil War for my PhD research because it is a polarizing topic in Spain and in Catalonia, my original home. The topic is polarizing partly because of the lack of a thorough transitional justice process after General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship ended in 1975, which has made the past a difficult place to (re)visit. The approach to the past is heavily influenced by propaganda from the left and the right, peripheral nationalists and state nationalists, political parties, trade unions, and even the Catholic Church. Few people are able to speak about the bloody past of Spain without falling into propagandistic messages, and those who try not to fall into this trap are easily accused of being supporters of one side or the other. Being in the United States as a graduate student probably helped me decide to study the civil war in Spain. Although I had a lot of emotions about the Spanish Civil War—my grandmother was an orphan of the war and her life had been marked by it—the physical distance was useful and allowed me to study the war from an analytical point of view. When I went back to live in Spain for several months to do fieldwork, the physical distance was removed, and I had to make a strenuous effort to stay analytical and neutral as a researcher. I honestly believe that I managed to do it, but this required being alert throughout the entire time I was in the field.

I conducted more than nine months of fieldwork in Spain, which involved archival and bibliographical research, as well as semistructured interviews with survivors of the civil war in different provinces throughout the country.1 In this chapter, I will discuss the interviews, although I conducted them in conjunction with the archival research. For example, when I visited local and regional archives, I sought potential interviewees through local historians and local archive workers. These people, together with friends and acquaintances, were crucial points of contact during fieldwork. Indeed, most of my interviewees were selected through a snowball approach, whereby one interview “snowballed” into others via their personal connections.

The interviews I conducted with civil war survivors in Spain were among the most fulfilling and enlightening exchanges in my professional life. From these witnesses, I learned a lot about the civil war that I had not grasped from the dozens of history books I had read on the conflict.² However, my pool of interview participants presented particular challenges. I interviewed people who were teenagers or adults during the Spanish Civil War, which took place between 1936 and 1939. Because I conducted the interviews in 2007, my universe of cases were people no younger than age seventy-seven; the average age of my respondents was eighty-four. Of course, interviewing people of this age was not an easy task; it required time and patience. I could not jump straight to the key questions for my research, most of which referred to the distant past. One of the best pieces of advice I received before carrying out my interviews was from Juan Linz, then a Yale professor emeritus, who told me to ask the interviewees about something they remembered about their lives before the beginning of the civil war: How was their kitchen arranged? How was their bedroom set up? What was their street like? This was a starting point for a conversation that enabled people to mentally situate themselves at that moment in time.

I was initially worried that my interviewees would not be able to remember much about the prewar period, the civil war, and the immediate postwar years, which were so far in the past. But most of them surprised me. Perhaps their short-term memory was vanishing, but their long-term memory was remarkably lucid. The interviews showed me that traumatic events leave a clear imprint on people, and they do not easily forget these events and everything surrounding them. Getting to the meat of the interviews frequently took several hours of conversation, which I enjoyed most of the time. I have always relished the company of older people, so I did not mind the long chats.3

That said, sometimes interviews were exhausting, especially if I was conducting a handful of them back-to-back. (I did this when visiting villages or cities outside Barcelona, on short trips during which I conducted several interviews in a few days.) The logistics of these long interviews were difficult, but it was also strenuous to hear the stories about neighbors or relatives being killed, raped, or thrown in a mass grave, or about ancestors escaping Spain as refugees only to be killed in a Nazi concentration camp a few years later. I remember those months of fieldwork as some of the most wonderful months of my life, but I also feel that those stories left a little scar inside of me. They made me feel the reality of the civil war that had torn my country apart, including my own family. At the same time, I do believe that the lessons from that fieldwork period stayed with me, aiding me in conducting research in other conflict-torn places such as Chile, Argentina, or contemporary Catalonia.

Historically, there have been political tensions between Catalonia and the rest of Spain, mostly due to the deficient accommodation of national minorities within the Spanish state. Also, although there were many Francoist supporters in Catalonia, this territory has often been associated with the Republican side during the civil war, as it was one of the places where the left was strongest, and one of the last regions to fall into Francoist hands. Being a Catalan researcher helped me to relate and connect with interview subjects from Catalonia, but it did not help that much in other parts of Spain or with interviewees who sympathized with the Francoist side. Outside Catalonia, friend and acquaintance networks were useful; once people had a point of reference (I was coming on behalf of X), it was easier for them to open up and interact and share stories with me.

On a few occasions, the interviews were not successful because people did not want to talk or felt threatened or scared about sharing too much. Quite strikingly, some people in Spain are still afraid of possible reprisals for recounting things that happened during the civil war or for sharing their political views. Having a university researcher stamp from an American university was helpful on some occasions because it reassured people that this interview was part of a serious investigation. During the interviews, I learned a lot about what could be asked and what could not be asked about the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship, and about how things could be asked in a different kind of format (i.e., closed-ended survey). Indeed, this learning process was extremely helpful for a nationwide survey I designed (together with Paloma Aguilar and Héctor Cebolla) in April 2008.4 For example, in this closed-ended survey, we asked about individual and family victimization during the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship, a pioneering question in Spanish survey research that people have later used in other postconflict settings. We included this question despite the fact that some people were skeptical about its success, and we did obtain a decent rate of response. I learned about the feasibility of this question—and about the best way to format it in a closed-ended questionnaire—during my interviews. Conducting fieldwork is a learning process that has positive externalities. In this case, the process of conducting the interviews helped me design a survey.

In the Politics & Society article that came out of this research, I wrote the following:

Although the semi-structured interviews might involve some measurement problems (e.g., backward projection of current political preferences, report bias), the advantage of this method is that it allows the researcher to engage in deep conversations with the respondents and to access what Fujii calls “meta data” (information that goes beyond the interview itself). In this particular case, the interviews put me in a key position to ask about sensitive issues such as political loyalties and wartime experiences, and they allowed me to assess feelings, sensations, and/or attitudes. In fact, the interviews were accompanied by the expression of a myriad of feelings: some interviewees were initially reluctant to talk about that period, some expressed deep emotions when talking about their experiences (e.g., crying), and some did not let me record their testimony due to shame or fear of reprisals.5

It is important to note that those on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War had not had many opportunities to speak about their traumatic experiences in the aftermath of the conflict. That was the case for both the dictatorship (1939–1975) and the democratic period (1977–present) due to the “pact of forgetting” that accompanied the transition to democracy in Spain. Among my interviewees, these people were generally more reluctant to be interviewed and to speak about the war, but some of them ended up being very happy to share their experiences with me. They often thanked me for listening at the end of the interview. I still remember an interviewee who burst into tears after the interview and told me, “you are the first person to whom I have ever recounted this.” In a way, some of these interviews were a kind of therapy for the subjects, and I wished I had had more training on how to handle them. I believe that I was only able to conduct this kind of fieldwork because I had a deep knowledge of the case, as well as of the social reality and the feelings that accompanied the remembrance of the civil war and the dictatorship in Spain.

My interviews did not have major ethical challenges because I was studying an old civil war in a liberal democracy, and despite the fears of some individuals, people could no longer be punished or prosecuted for their actions during the conflict. Nonetheless, I did follow the necessary ethical procedures to make sure nobody could be harmed in any way, and I protected the anonymity and privacy of the interviewees. Quite unexpectedly, I did face one ethical challenge a few years after finishing my PhD when I received an email from the grandchild of one of my interviewees. This person wanted access to the recorded interview I had conducted with his grandfather, who had recently passed away. However, I was not in a position to share that interview, and I did not do it. This was a major disappointment for the grandchild of my interviewee, but I was backed by my university’s institutional review board (IRB) committee, and the issue was resolved with relative ease. This made me realize how important it is to design IRB protocols that will protect subjects even after their passing.

1. The research was approved by Yale University’s FAS Human Subjects Committee under IRB protocol number 0704002514. For transparency purposes, the interview protocol has been posted on my website, and interested readers can access it through this link: http://www.laiabalcells.com/wp-content/uploads/Online-Appendix-PS.pdf. Anonymized details on the interviewees are also provided in Table A.4.12 of my book: Laia Balcells, Rivalry and Revenge: The Politics of Violence During Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

3. A book written by a journalist, Montserrat Roig, on Catalan survivors of the Nazi camps, was a reference for me at that time. Roig had interviewed advanced age survivors and managed to collect incredible details of their experiences in the camps: Montserrat Roig, Els catalans als camps nazis (Barcelona, Spain: Edicions 62, 2017).