Millie Creightoncomments about the Korean class, I received a reaction that seemed
strange to me, one that I still recall well.
The woman seemed visibly upset. She started to fidget then shook
her head. I became aware of her breathing. She finally said something,
not to me but as if to herself, the air in the room, or the universe at
large: “My sister told me I should not have come.” Her consterna-
tion continued, as did her mumblings. There were several more muf-
fled references to “her sister” and how her sister had reprimanded her
and frequently warned her about things. Until that point, I had seen
myself as the good ethnographer following protocol well. This came
as a difficulty I could not quite remember being discussed in methods
texts. At some point, I was nearly tempted to look under the table for
this sister she suddenly kept mentioning, more to herself than to me.
No mention of a sister or any other family members had ever come up
in the interview or in any of my other interactions with her.
Far from marking the end of the interview, the informant seemed to
be getting all geared up for something I did not yet understand. There
were signs of agitation. Several textbooks or methods books suggest
taking note of such responses to questions as clues to things not easily
verbalized. I somehow knew not to put the notebook away yet and re-
ally wish I had left the first half blank. This reaction to a question out-
side the research topic did not seem to fit in to the flow of the rest of
the interview at all. Things were indeed developing in ways I had not
foreseen. Finally, the young woman looked at me. A decision seemed
to have been made between herself and her understanding of her life
and her relationship with her sister (who at this point remained a mys-
terious character to me). The floodgates were about to open. She was
about to give a narrative of her life to the ethnographer. A new stage
in note taking was beginning, not ending.
Again, if I had been the good ethnographer, I would have probably
gotten her back “on topic.” However, in Basic Interviewing Skills,
Gordon cautions against “using too much topic control” (Gordon
1992 , 147 ). He writes, “The art of interviewing involves skill in ob-
serving when the respondent should be given complete freedom from
topic control and when strong topic control is needed” (Gordon 1992 ,
147 ). What the informant was on the verge of discussing was not on