‘Betweenness’ and the Negotiation of Similarity and Difference in the Interview Setting: Reflections on Interviewing Grandfathers as a Young, Female Researcher

Abstract

Purpose

To demonstrate how generational as well as gendered identities impacted on researcher-researched relationships built during the interview process, engendering specific insights about contemporary British grandfathering.

Methodology/approach

An ‘ad-hoc’ reflection of interview transcripts and researcher field notes generated from 31 qualitative interviews with men who are grandfathers, to reflexively interrogate how various identity markers operated within my encounters with them, as a young female researcher.

Findings

Men positioned me within a grandparent-grandchild relationship during the interviews, which afforded specific insights into contemporary grandfatherhood, including the socio-historical context in which grandfathering takes place. Whilst perceptions and assumptions about gender influence how participants perceive researchers, focusing too rigidly on gender is problematic. It risks re-enforcing potentially stereotypical assumptions about men and women, thus downplaying the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in men’s constructions and performances of their diverse later life identities, as well as obscuring the complex intersectionalities and power relations that operate in the field.

Originality/value

To argue that the concept of ‘betweenness’ aids in developing a more robust understanding of the complex and knowable negotiations of similarity and difference within research encounters.

Citation

Tarrant, A. (2016), "‘Betweenness’ and the Negotiation of Similarity and Difference in the Interview Setting: Reflections on Interviewing Grandfathers as a Young, Female Researcher", Gender Identity and Research Relationships (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Vol. 14), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 43-62. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1042-319220160000014015