Identità in gioco, contestazioni e strategie per una postura neutrale nell’intervista

In this paper we discuss the interactional management of the interviewer’s neutrality in the course of group interviews in which interviewers and interviewees partially share background knowledge and life experience. Common access to knowledge and experience between participants and researchers, while being a resource for collaboration and mutual understanding in conversation, also provide the ground for questioning the interviewer’s neutral stance, in that it may cast the interviewer as someone who is entitled to assess the validity and reliability of the interviewee’s reports, as well as to judge them from her/his “informed” point of view. Given this background, we will analyze how the interviewer’s neutrality is made relevant during group interviews of working fathers by both the interviewees and the interviewers and how it is interactionally managed. In particular, we will show 1) how the interviewees question the “neutral” hearership of the interviewer, by attributing her/him the ability to see things from her/his specific (such as, gendered) standpoint and 2) how the interviewers account for their neutral positioning by either resisting identity attributions and thus, acting “impersonally” their institutional role, or explicitly disclosing their interests and identities. We discuss the analyses within the theoretical and methodological framework provided by Conversation Analysis and, within a reflexive perspective, grounding on Sheila Benhabib’s conceptualization of the “Concrete other”