Free Association Interviewing

The Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) is a qualitative method for the production and analysis of interview data that combines a narrative emphasis with the psychoanalytic principle of free association. Questions that elicit narratives encourage interviewees to remember specific events in their experiences. These, unlike generalized accounts, possess emotional resonance. The principle of free association is based on the idea that it is the unconsciously motivated links between ideas, rather than just their contents, that provide insight into the emotional meanings of interviewees’ accounts (see PSYCHOANALYTIC METHODS). Therefore, it is particularly appropriate for exploring questions about interviewees’ identities or that touch emotions and sensibilities (in contrast to methods designed to elicit opinions or facts).

In most empirical social science methods, research subjects are assumed to know themselves well enough to give reliable accounts. The FANI method instead posits defenses against anxiety as a core feature of research subjects, as of all subjects (including researchers). Because anxiety characterizes the research relationship and will be more or less prominent depending on the topic, the setting, and the degree of rapport, defenses against anxiety will potentially compromise interviewees’ ability to know the meaning of their actions, purposes, and relations. Such unconscious defenses are one feature of a psychosocial subject, part of the psychic dimension produced by a unique biography structured by defenses, desires, and mental conflict. These influence and are influenced by the social dimension, which consists of a shared social world that is understood as a combination of intersubjective processes, real events, and the discourses through which events are rendered meaningful.

The method was developed as an adaptation of the biographical interpretative method (see BIOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE INTERPRETIVE METHOD) in the context of a project investigating the relationship between anxiety and fear of crime (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000). A narrative question format about specific events (“Can you tell me about a time when … ?”) was adopted in order to discourage responses of a generalized and rationalized kind, as frequently elicited by a SEMISTRUCTURED INTERVIEW. OPEN-ENDED questions were asked, and “why” questions were avoided. Interviewees’ answers were followed up in their order of telling, using their phrasing. These protocols are designed to keep within participants’ own meaning frames rather than the interviewer’s.

The FANI method, using gestalt principles, entails holding the whole data set in mind when interpreting the meaning of an extract. Consistent with psychoanalytic principles, rather than expect coherence, the researcher is alert to signs of incoherence and conflict in the text, such as changes in emotional tone, contradictions, and avoidances.

During interviews and data analysis, interviewers use their own feelings as data, following psychoanalytic principles of transference and counter transference, in order to identify their own emotional investments. Each participant is interviewed twice. [Page 405]Two researchers listen to the first audiotape before the second interview, and the process of noticing the significance of links, associations, and contradictions contributes to the formulation of narrative questions for the second interview.