Studying the making of geographical knowledge: The implications of insider interviews

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of being a ‘double’ insider when conducting interviews. Double insider means being an insider both in relation to one's research matter – in the authors’ case the making of geographical knowledge – and in relation to one's interviewees – our colleagues. The article is a reflection paper in the sense that we reflect upon experiences drawn from a previous research project carried out in Danish academia. It is important that the project was situated in a Scandinavian workplace culture because this has bearings for the social, cultural, and economic situation in which knowledge was constructed. The authors show that being a double insider affects both the interview situation and how interviews are planned, located, and analysed. Being an insider in relation to one's interviewees gives the advantage of having a shared history and a close knowledge of the context, and these benefits outnumber the disadvantages. Being an insider in relation to one's research matter makes it difficult to contest hegemonic discourses and tacit values and ideas. Recommendations on how to handle the double insider situation are given. The article concludes that for analytical purposes, it is useful to separate the two roles, but in reality they coexist and are intertwined.

Keywords:

• geography
• insiders
• interviews
• positionality
• power relations

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to our colleagues for having shared with us their time and knowledge, as well as their thoughts on their theory and practice. The study was financed by grants from the Danish Social Science Research Council and the Danish Agricultural and Veterinary Research Council. We are also indebted to Kath Browne and Jess Pilegaard for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. Finally, we thank the two reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. The issue of ‘putting philosophies of geographies into practice’ was first raised at the annual meeting of Royal Geographical Society – Institute of British Geographers in London in 2002. One session was devoted to addressing geographers’ everyday activities and the theoretical-methodological tools which geographers use.

2. It should be noted that the dialogue project mentioned earlier resulted in the book titled Geographers of Norden (Hägerstrand & Buttimer 1988).

3. In this paper, we apply the Scandinavian definition of Scandinavia as comprising the countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

4. This led to the first paper of this study, a paper which the interviewees were invited to comment on before publication. The reflections and analyses in the present paper concerning the roles of the interviewer are, however, solely based on our interpretations and have thus been a more internal endeavour.

5. Here we employ Browne's idea of friendship: ‘By friends I mean that we would meet regularly, outside of the research setting, share social occasions and hold a common notion of being friends’ (Browne 2003, 134).

6. While this is a crude generalisation, we want to make clear that Scandinavia is different from, for example, the UK and the USA in these aspects and that our knowledge is constructed in this particular context.

7. It should be noted that the interviews were conducted in Danish. We have chosen verbatim translations over ‘elegant’ ones. Further, we have avoided quoting from interviews where the tonal clues, such as irony, should be known in order to fully understand the meaning of the sentence.

8. ‘Cultural turns, Rural turns: critical (re)appraisals’, 16–18 September 2003, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, organised by the Rural Economy and Society Study Group (RESSG).

9. See Reiss (2005) for an interesting and very honest account of the consequences of not showing the results of one's research to interviewees before publication.