This paper focuses on analysing and discussing research interview as social interaction and conversation. Nowadays, the researcher is seen as the essential tool of data gathering in many research approaches, such as ethnography and narrativity. Furthermore, many researchers have reached the point of interview as negotiated text, which is produced socially and situationally in the relationships between active research participants, interviewer and interviewee. These kinds of assumptions require researcher reflexivity in examining the ways in which research participants together produce meanings, narratives, knowledge, and shared understanding in interview interaction (e.g. Coffey, 1999, 2002; Davies et al., 2004). Despite the fact that interview data are produced and gathered through social interaction, until recently researchers have paid only limited attention to how different individual and socio-structural contributions, such as age, gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic background, shape the course and conduct of interviews (Manderson, Bennett & Andajani-Sutjahjo, 2006). In this paper, we therefore aim to investigate the various factors related to the interactions between interviewer and interviewee, and to the positioning of these research participants.

In this paper, we drawn on open-ended narrative interviews gathered by the authors. We have interviewed seven women researchers from human and social sciences (aged from 36 to 48 years), five entrepreneurs working as private counsellors and work life developers (three women and two men aged from 32 to 58 years), and sixteen vocational teachers teaching in various fields, e.g. technology and transport, and social services and health care (ten men and six women aged from 31 to 57 years). Our aim was to understand their identities, agencies and learning at work. We utilised ideas from discourse and narrative analysis approaches (e.g. Riessman, 2008; Wetherell, 1998) to analyse the interview interactions.

The findings show that research participants’ gender, age and profession are particularly intertwined with the process of interaction and positioning in interviews. If the backgrounds of research participants vary amply, then interactive relationships are greatly diverse, researcher is positioned in many ways by interviewees (positions vary from young uneducated girl to trustworthy listener), and researcher takes multiple positions. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the research relationship and positions of research participants can change during an interview. Based on the findings, we consider how interviewers need to be mutual and emphatic, and recognise the factors which can be related to the interview interactions in order to facilitate confidential communication. However, there is no need to minimise all differences between interviewer and interviewee. We conclude that understanding the various factors that shape interaction of research participants is a significant task in analysing and interpreting interviews, as well as evaluating quality of research.