When conducting interviews about sensitive subject matter such as family life, powerful emotions may arise. The kinds of unexpected distress that can surface in interviews concerning topics laden with personal significance are different to the readily anticipated trauma that accompanies interviews in post-crisis or post-conflict situation. This article analyses the ethical considerations that accompany such research, drawing upon literature from oral history and qualitative sociology. The article traces ethical issues during the temporal phases of qualitative research – before, during and after an interview – before proposing three strategies that interviewers can adopt to help protect narrators from ongoing harm or distress after an interview. Such ethical safeguards include the self-interview, the post-interview follow-up with the narrator, and adopting an ethics of reciprocity that allows the narrator to feel that they are contributing to a larger purpose through involvement in research.
AbramsL (2019) Heroes of their own life stories: narrating the female self in the feminist age. Cultural and Social History16: 205–224.
2.
AbramsL (2014) Liberating the female self: epiphanies, conflict and coherence in the life stories of post-war British women. Social History39: 14–35.
3.
BirchMMillerT (2000) Inviting intimacy: the interview as therapeutic opportunity. International Journal of Social Research Methodology3: 189–202.
4.
BirchMMillerTMauthnerM, et al. (2014) Introduction to the second edition. In: MillerTBirchMMauthnerM, et al (eds) Ethics in Qualitative Research. London: SAGE Publications.
5.
BlixBHBerendonkCCaineV (2019) Theoretical foundations of narrative care: turning towards relational ethics. Nursing Ethics26: 1917–1927.
6.
BornatJ (2010) Remembering and reworking emotions: the reanalysis of emotion in an interview. Oral History38: 43–52.
7.
BradleyKPuriA (2016) Creating an oral history archive: digital opportunities and ethical issues. Australian Historical Studies47: 75–91.
8.
BrannenJMossPMooneyA (2004) Working and Caring Over the Twentieth Century: Change and Continuity in Four Generation Families. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
9.
CaveMSloanSM (eds) (2014) Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of a Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
10.
ClandininDJBrassDCaineV, et al. (2018) The Relational Ethics of Narrative Inquiry. New York: Routledge.
11.
ClandininDJConnellyFM (2000) Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
12.
DavisA (2012) Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
13.
FieldS (2006) Beyond “healing”: trauma, oral history and regeneration. Oral History34: 31–42.
14.
FrancisM (2019) Remembering the family that I thought we would be. Oral History47: 49–60.
15.
FrischM (1990) A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. Albany: State University of New York Press.
16.
GabbJ (2010) Home truths: ethical issues in family research. Qualitative Research10: 461–478.
17.
GilliganC (2011) Joining the Resistance. Cambridge, UK: Policy Press.
GreenspanH (2011) Collaborative interpretation of survivors’ accounts: a radical challenge to conventional practice. Holocaust Studies17: 85–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2011.11087273
20.
HallR (2019) Emotional histories: materiality, temporality and subjectivity in oral history interviews with fathers and sons. Oral History47: 61–70.
21.
HammersleyMTraianouA (2015) Ethics in Qualitative Research: Controversies and Contexts. London: SAGE Publications.
22.
HeldV (2006) The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
23.
HollwayWJeffersonT (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method. London: SAGE Publications.
24.
HolmesK (2017) Does it matter if she cried? Recording emotion and the Australian Generations Oral History Project. Oral History Review44: 56–76.
25.
JesseeE (2011) The limits of oral history: ethics and methodology amid highly politicized research settings. Oral History Review38: 287–307.
26.
JonesDW (1998) Distressing histories and unhappy interviewing. Oral History26: 49–56.
27.
KokanovićRMichaelsPAJohnston-AtaataK (eds) (2018) Paths to Parenthood: Emotions on the Journey through Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Early Parenting. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan.
28.
LaymanL (2009) Reticence in oral history interviews. Oral History Review36: 207–230.
29.
McIntoshMJMorseJM (2009) Institutional review boards and the ethics of emotion. In: DenzinNKGiardinaMD (eds) Qualitative Inquiry and Social Justice: Toward a Politics of Hope. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
30.
MillerT (2017) Telling the difficult things: creating spaces for disclosure, rapport and ‘collusion’ in qualitative interviews. Women’s Studies International Forum61: 81–86.
31.
MillerT (2005) Making Sense of Motherhood: A Narrative Approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
32.
MitchellD (2019) Oral histories and enlightened witnessing. In: MoruziKMusgroveNPascoe LeahyC (eds) Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 211–231.
33.
OakleyA (1981) From here to Maternity. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
34.
PascoeC (2015) Mum’s the word: advice to Australian mothers since 1945. Journal of Family Studies21(3): 218–234.
35.
Pascoe LeahyC (2019a) From the little wife to the supermom? Maternographies of feminism and mothering in Australia since 1945. Feminist Studies45(1): 100–128.
36.
Pascoe LeahyC (2019b) Selection and sampling methodologies in oral histories of mothering, parenting and family. Oral History47(1): 105–116.
37.
Pascoe LeahyCBueskensP (eds) (2019) Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
38.
PooleySQureshiK (eds) (2016) Parenthood Between Generations: Transforming Reproductive Cultures. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
39.
RaphaelD (1975) Matresence, becoming a mother, a “new/old” rite de passage. In: RaphaelD (ed.) Being Female: Reproduction, Power and Change. Berlin: De Gruyter.
40.
ReynoldsR (2012) Trauma and the relational dynamics of life-history interviewing. Australian Historical Studies43: 78–88.
41.
RisemanN (2018) “Describing misbehaviour in Vung Tau as ‘mischief’ is ridiculously coy”: ethnographic refusal, reticence, and the oral historian’s dilemma. Oral History Review45: 84–100.
42.
RoperM (2003) Analysing the analysed: transference and counter-transference in the oral history encounter. Oral History31: 20–32.
43.
ScanlonJ (1993) Challenging the imbalances of power in feminist oral history: developing a take-and-give methodology. Women’s Studies International Forum16: 639–645.
44.
SheftelAZembrzyckiS (eds) (2013) Oral History off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
45.
SheftelAZembrzyckiS (2010) Only human: a reflection on the ethical and methodological challenges of working with “difficult” stories. Oral History Review37: 191–214.
46.
SrigleyK (2009) Stories of strife? Remembering the great depression. Oral History Forum d’Histoire Orale20: 1–20.
47.
SrigleyKZembrzyckiSIacovettaF (eds) (2018) Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century. London and New York: Routledge.
48.
StephensJ (2011) Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory and Care. New York: Columbia University Press.
49.
SternDBruschweiler-SternN (1998) The Birth of a Mother: How Motherhood Changes You Forever. London: Bloomsbury.
50.
ThomsonA (2019) ‘When’s dad home?’: an oral history of inter-war Australian fatherhood. Oral History47: 35–48.
51.
ThomsonA (2016) Anzac memories: putting popular memory theory into practice in Australia. In: PerksRThomsonA (eds) The Oral History Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 343–353.
52.
ThomsonR (2014) Generational research: between historical and sociological imaginations. International Journal of Social Research Methodology17: 147–156.
53.
ThomsonRKehilyMJHadfieldL, et al. (2011) Making Modern Mothers. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.
54.
TrontoJC (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.
55.
VickersEL (2019) Unexpected trauma in oral interviewing. Oral History Review46: 134–141.
56.
YowV (2018) What can oral historians learn from psychotherapists?Oral History46: 33–41.
57.
YowVR (2015) Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences. 3rd edn.Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
