“I may have benefited more than anyone else”: Responses to Staller’s (2024) Write-Up of Jane Gilgun’s Career Interviews

Abstract

This commentary is a response to an invitation the editorial board of Qualitative Social Work extended to me to comment on an article that reports on my career interview as a qualitative social work researcher. The article appears in the present issue of the journal (Staller, 2024). The editors and I agree that Karen Staller did an exemplary job of interpreting the transcripts on which the article is based but that the transcripts were incomplete. In my enthusiasm for what I did say, I left things out. In this article, I added to the material that Karen had access to, such as laying out the principles of pragmatism that underlie qualitative social work research and practice and how I coped with the effects of hearing stories about violence and gained from it. I also added to the theory of violence that Karen wrote about and to her descriptions of my relationships with other feminists. I gave a brief account of deductive qualitative analysis that I did not mention at all in the interviews. I realize more than ever that there are differences between interviews, which are spontaneous utterances, and articles, that authors write over time, reflect upon, and revise countless times. Then editors have a go at them.