Now that I have done eight interviews and have the remaining interviewees in my sights, I am thinking about the ethics and the process of interviewing in a different way.
I've done my share of interviewing, for newsletters of various kinds, for eLearning exemplar sites, on journalism courses etc. With all of these interviews (usually unstructured or semi-structured), you are interviewing to get information for your story, and some colour with the odd quote. Once you've done the interview you need to identify your 'angle', and when you write you use that angle to focus what you have learned.
In an ethnographic study, you are interviewing your 'key informants' for, well, their key sources and pieces of information. But although you might want to pretend that you are reporting them in a naturalistic way, you are of course interpreting what they say even as you sit in front of them. Listening to my interviews again I am learning a lot about my own conceptions as I listen to what I say as well as to what my subjects say. I can hear myself interpreting as I listen, so now I have another layer to look at!
Jen Ross (bless her cotton socks!) has raised the issues of transcription as translation at exactly the right time for me. She makes the point that the transcription is a different document from the interview tape; that it reveals things that may not be evident on the tape; things like pauses and comments from the interviewer that the listener may 'erase' without realising. Her story of the tape that was inadvertantly transcribed by two different transcibers is fascinating. I haven't yet decided if I will transcribe my interviews; I am enjoying listening to them and thinking about them and making notes as I do so. But if I do transcribe them I will be much more alert to the issues that the textual reproduction raises than I would have been before.