{"title":"The continuum of rapport: Ethical tensions in qualitative interviews with vulnerable participants","authors":"Evi Schmid, Veerle Garrels, Børge Skåland","doi":"10.1177/14687941231224600","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Rapport is generally considered an essential component of successful interviewing, where participants are willing to share and divulge information. The present paper contributes to the research on rapport in qualitative interviewing by exploring ethical tensions that researchers may experience when conducting qualitative interviews with vulnerable participants. The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with nine researchers from various fields within social sciences who had extensive experience in doing research with diverse vulnerable groups. We identified six ethical tensions related to building rapport with people in vulnerable life situations that cover issues concerning both too little and too much rapport. Findings illustrate that rapport as the ‘ideal’ for the researcher-participant relationship may need nuancing. The study concludes that researchers undertaking qualitative interviews on sensitive topics need to have a conscious awareness of ethical tensions that may arise when building rapport with their participants","PeriodicalId":48265,"journal":{"name":"Qualitative Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Qualitative Research","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941231224600","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Rapport is generally considered an essential component of successful interviewing, where participants are willing to share and divulge information. The present paper contributes to the research on rapport in qualitative interviewing by exploring ethical tensions that researchers may experience when conducting qualitative interviews with vulnerable participants. The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with nine researchers from various fields within social sciences who had extensive experience in doing research with diverse vulnerable groups. We identified six ethical tensions related to building rapport with people in vulnerable life situations that cover issues concerning both too little and too much rapport. Findings illustrate that rapport as the ‘ideal’ for the researcher-participant relationship may need nuancing. The study concludes that researchers undertaking qualitative interviews on sensitive topics need to have a conscious awareness of ethical tensions that may arise when building rapport with their participants
期刊介绍:
Qualitative Research is a fully peer reviewed international journal that publishes original research and review articles on the methodological diversity and multi-disciplinary focus of qualitative research within the social sciences. Research based on qualitative methods, and methodological commentary on such research, have expanded exponentially in the past decades. This is the case across a number of disciplines including sociology, social anthropology, health and nursing, education, cultural studies, human geography, social and discursive psychology, and discourse studies.