‘How do you get them to talk to you?’ Interviewing drug sellers in the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

How do we get drug sellers to talk with us? We approach them from the standpoint that what they know, their experiences and perceptions about drug dealing as work, is a specialized knowledge and that we are asking them to share it with us despite the potential for serious personal risk. In each interview, we try to overcome difference and social distance by identifying what we call nodes of affinity – commonalities or shared experiences. As meanings are negotiated and narratives constructed, power shifts back and forth between interviewer and interviewee, shaping the give-and-take process of knowledge building. We discuss the ways in which social isolation, a defining feature of the social context of drug selling, can affect the interview process. We describe some of the strategies we have derived from the symbolic interactionist and social constructionist traditions to help engender trust and rapport with interviewees. And we describe the reciprocal presentations of self by interviewer and interviewee and the social construction of meanings and narratives in the course of the interviews. We hope this will contribute to the existing literature on the micropolitics or the relations of power that are negotiated within interview processes such that knowledge gets co-constructed.

Notes

Notes

1. In his study of homeless women, ethnographer Elliot Liebow stresses a similar point: ‘It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of … familiarity. It is essential, I believe, in this kind of study – a participant observer kind of study – that the relationships be as symmetrical as possible, that there be a quid pro quo …’ (1993, xii).