Conducting Biographical-Narrative Interviews During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Methodological Reflections on Situated Affective Encounters and Emotional Reflexivity
In pre-pandemic times, biographical-narrative interviews were conducted regularly on-site in intimate face-to-face situations. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by several lockdowns and the politics of social distancing, forced many scholars to use digital tools for interviewing. In this arti...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
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FQS
2025-01-01
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| Series: | Forum: Qualitative Social Research |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/4357 |
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| Summary: | In pre-pandemic times, biographical-narrative interviews were conducted regularly on-site in intimate face-to-face situations. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by several lockdowns and the politics of social distancing, forced many scholars to use digital tools for interviewing. In this article, I take a self-reflexive, autoethnographic look at my own research process during the COVID-19 pandemic. I explore the problems I faced in conducting interviews both on-site and in online settings. I focus on the affective and emotional dimension, as this was strongly influenced by "atmospheres of anxiety" (TRIGG, 2022), created by the pandemic. I propose the concept of "emotional reflexivity" (HOLMES, 2015) as a tool for dealing with the challenges encountered in the research field. Furthermore, I advocate an epistemic exploration of the objections and opportunities of conducting biographical-narrative interviews in digital online space. In so doing, I aim to contribute to the empirically grounded, methodological discussion of the affective and emotional underpinnings and diverse ways of conducting such interviews.
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| ISSN: | 1438-5627 |