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Dorothy John - who was on the ESRC 'BNIM' course that Prue and I ran at the beginning of 2005 -- sent us the following email which I thought might be of more than just personal interest. With her permission I'm circulating it both to those who attended the ESRC training and to the biographic-narrative-BNIM jiscmail group. If any of you have comments to make or relevant experiences to narrate, please do so: we need all the insightful thoughts and narratives we can offer to each other. Best wishes Tom Dorothy John writes of a BNIM interview: > The interviewee was slightly uneasy when I explained that it was a life story > interview, in fact she said if she had known she would not have agreed. > However, she spoke for a fairly short time and said 'that's all, that's > enough'. She went off to prepare tea, after which I suggested asking some > questions. One question touched on a relationship in her younger days. I think > the question took her back 'into' the events at the time, she talked a bit on > the subject and went silent. I thought she was finished but I quite overlooked > that she had, as it were, 'left her living room' and was 'facing' the events > of the past. > > My error is that I was not paying attention to what she was experiencing. I > was checking my notes for other questions. I realised my mistake when I almost > 'startled' her in introducing another question, and saw that she was 'in the > past'. It was a bad feeling to realize that she may have wanted to talk about > a painful episode but I was reading my notes instead of her face and took her > silence as being the end of that subject. My first thought was, oh dear, I > have broken her gestalt, but it is 'of the moment' and can't be corrected. I > will have to remember to pay closer attention to the interviewee instead of > working on 'the next question'. End of Confession. >What is odd is that it is not easy to understand what is 'the gestalt', but >when I realized what had happened, no other concept came to mind but that >'I had broken the gestalt'. > > Dorothy John > St. Hugh's College > University of Oxford > P.S. by Tom: On reading this over, I am not certain that one "can't correct the mistake". I'm sure you can't rely on being able to correct the mistake, at least in subsession two. I know that we teach that you should make the asssumption that, having launched the interviewee on a later topic, you can't go back to an earlier one, and the reaction that Dorothy sensitively noted of the interviewee being 'startled out of her reverie' indicates the value of that rule. On the other hand, having noticed that you had done this, you could then have interrupted your own 'going on to the next topic', perhaps, and said something like the following: "I'm really sorry I interrupted your thinking just now. Perhaps we could hold till later the question [on the later topic] I've just asked, and go back to whatever you were thinking about when I broke into your thoughts. I feel that you hadn't finished what you were thinking about. Would you mind?" or something like that. Has anybody else had an experience of 'trying to repair an accidental breaking of the interviewee's gestalt'? What happened?