“This Person is Safe”: An Exemplar of Conducting Individual Interviews in Qualitative Research with Black Women

Abstract

Significant conceptual and empirical evidence has been found through qualitative research about the benefits, limitations, and uses of individual interviews. However, there is scant research illustrating how researchers use specific techniques that center participants’ intersecting identities to build rapport, trust, and authentic connections during individual interviews, and especially during interviews with Black women. We illustrate how we used eight empirically grounded techniques in our qualitative individual interviews with Black women. Through our analysis of the interviews, the concept of safety emerged. “This person is safe” reflects the combined stories the women reported regarding their experiences engaging in individual interviews. In this article, we provide a brief background on individual interviewing in qualitative research, followed by the framing of our work. Thereafter, we provide context about the exemplar study, outline techniques shown to be effective in the literature, and provide examples from the exemplar study to show how each technique was used. Further research is needed to examine how researchers use various techniques in qualitative individual interviews in general, but with Black women more specifically.