The Interview as Trial and Error and as Encounter: Inside the Black Box of a Historian in Tanzania

Abstract

This article presents an interview-based investigation conducted as part of a history thesis on female education in Tanzania. It reviews the entire process, from the choice of the study site and interviewees to the analysis of the interviews conducted. In line with the approach proposed by Sources of making research processes visible and explicit, it delves into the “black box” of my work as a historian with two objectives and two, somewhat different, audiences in mind. First, I address researchers in the fields of education and gender who wish to enter into a critical dialogue with my results or reuse the interviews I conducted. The information offered in this article allows readers to situate the collected testimony, providing them with the keys needed to understand how I arrived at the portrait of female educational experiences I present in my research. It thus prompts discussion of how my methodological choices influenced the results, and of potential complementary approaches to refine and enrich the proposed analyses. Moreover, as part of this effort to situate the collected testimony, I provide documentation enabling some of my interviews to be reused, since fourteen women agreed to let me share their recorded interviews. The article details in particular the conditions of two interviews, the transcripts of which are published in tandem with the French version of this article. These interviews reveal the perspectives of two women with contrasting backgrounds: one who had no access to schooling, the other with a secondary education, a rare occurrence in her generation. Beyond these two interviews, I can share twelve others with researchers working on the history of education or women in Tanzania. Second, I address those who use interviews in their social science research and are concerned with the methodological and ethical issues raised by this practice. Some sections of the article deal with topics already widely discussed in the literature (interviewee selection and anonymization, building relationships with interviewees, the prism of memory), while others deal with issues that have received far less attention, such as compensation, the role of intermediaries, and the constitution of oral archives. Discussing these issues, I recount my process of trial and error and my experience as a young researcher confronted with contradictory recommendations and working in a cultural context whose codes I did not fully master. My choices, which I present here, were influenced heavily by my encounters with the people I interviewed and with the many intermediaries who helped me in my research. By setting out clearly how I undertook a particular investigation, I reflect on how the ethics of social science interviews are rooted in situated practices.