On ‘doing being moral’ in the research interview

In qualitative research interviews, participants sometimes relate vivid, ethically charged accounts of their lifeworlds. However, the genre constraints of the interview discourage interviewers from expressions of direct affiliation (agreement, approval, disapproval) with the interviewee’s moral stances and rather encourage expressions of conversational alignment (attention, interest, comprehension) to keep the information flowing. Interviewees for their part may prefer and make a bid for more engagement from interviewers. We examine the affordances and constraints of the research interview and the discursive practices available to interviewees for ‘doing moral action’ in the interview: constructing their moral identities, describing their moral worlds, evaluating others, and attempting to more fully engage their interviewers. In the latter, interviewees employ a discursive ‘recruitment to action’ exercised subtly and indirectly by linguistically calibrating the space-time of their moral narratives to accord with the space-time of the interview and indexing their stories to transcendent norms and timeless truths. (Narrative analysis, indexicality, disaster, research interview, semistructured interview, social science interview, morality, ethics, nomic calibration).