The sustained snapshot: Incidental ethnographic encounters in qualitative interview studies

The literature on qualitative methods assumes that researchers will conduct interviews in the course of a participant-observation study but not that extensive observations of interviewees might happen to take place during an interview study. In this article, I raise questions about interview study methodologies, using the example of a life history interview project in which the interviewer stayed at interviewee’s homes, met with them for meals, encountered them at events, and kept careful field notes on all of these incidental ethnographic encounters. Reflecting on the ambivalent status of such incidental ethnographic encounters, I argue that qualitative interview methods suffer from the limitations of positivism because the interview encounter is privileged as the sole source of knowledge. I call for a more flexible approach to qualitative interviews that can accommodate and derive knowledge from the full range of encounters between the researcher and participant.