Interviewers, Interviewees and the Exercise of Power (Fictional‐critical Writing as a Method for Educational Research)

Abstract

Abstract This paper reports an investigation into the process of interviewing applicants for places on an inservice course for teachers in an institution of higher education. A number of interviews were tape‐recorded and transcribed, as were some of the discussions between the interviewers concerning the applicants. Attention is drawn to the problems created by the power dimension of the interview process, which is often taken for granted by interviewers. The paper also illustrates a method of organising research data by (a) writing a short story on the themes which emerge from an initial review of the data, and (b) gathering interpretive critiques of the story from various readers, in order to make explicit the significance of the story as an interpretation of the data.