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Reflexive accounts about qualitative interviewing within the context of educational policy in North Cyprus

University of Nottingham, UK, smertkan1{at}yahoo.co.uk

Located within policy studies and politics of education in North Cyprus, this article is a medium through which methodological quandaries about reflexive accounts of qualitative interviewing arise in a dialogic fashion within the arena of education reform. Relying primarily on field notes, it explores the two-way management and negotiation of identity work, its effects on data gathering, and the public and private sides of interviewing. The researcher, present author, argues through numerous examples that both interviewees and the interviewer are actively engaged in identity crafting. These co-constructed identities influence the data-gathering process and the emerging intersubjective narratives of lived experiences in social worlds. She also makes a case that reflexive accounts of identity work are intersubjective, co-constructed identities are not genuinely knowable and the identity work is not genuinely comprehensible.

Key Words: interviewing • identity work • policy research • research methodology

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Qualitative Research, Vol. 7, No. 4, 447-459 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1468794107082301


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