Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 2 | Page 14

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words?” This enables me to elicit the aspects of the phenomenon that are of most
importance to the participant; however, it may also leave the speaker vulnerable to going
deeper into painful memories than they intended. This is quite unlike a semi-structured
interview or a questionnaire survey, where I, as the researcher, may choose the specific
topics that we talk about, and limit the answers.
One of the strategies I used to minimise the risk of harm was careful pre-interview
preparation. As my participants are all university graduates, it might seem reasonable to
assume that they would understand the participant information sheets and feel able to ask
any questions arising from them. Even so, I anticipated that they might have questions or
concerns that they found it hard to voice, so I arranged to speak either face-to-face or over
the phone in the week before the interview. This pre-interview discussion provided some
participants with the opportunity to express fears, for example, about ‘the floodgates
opening’,8 which I was then able to address in advance.

Illustration 2: The Power Imbalance

As well as developing ‘non-oppressive relationships’ with participants,9 another
aspect of reducing harm is striving to minimise the power imbalance during the research
interview itself. As a person-centred counsellor, I aim to be consciously ‘anti-expert’ and
‘anti-power,’ and am familiar with working to create an environment as free from threat as

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9

Participant 5, ‘Alice,’ in pre-interview conversation.
McLeod, Qualitative research in counselling and psychotherapy (2011), 41.