The Research Vignette

Position: Writing as Interpretation

In qualitative research that is grounded in the interpretative paradigm, writing does not constitute an unproblematic act, external and subsequent to a finished process of interpretation. Rather, it has to be understood as a specifically situated act within the interpretative process that is continued in the meaningful reading of the produced text (Rath, 2012; Schachtner, 1993). In her programmatic article, “Writing: A Method of Inquiry,” Laurel Richardson (2003) notes,

Unlike quantitative work, which can be interpreted through its tables and summaries, qualitative work carries its meaning in its entire text. Just as a piece of literature is not equivalent to its “plot summary,” qualitative research is not contained in its abstracts. Qualitative research has to be read, not scanned; its meaning is in the reading. (p. 501)

The wide range of forms of representation that can be found in the qualitative research discourse is marked by two ideal-typical positions. One position represents a sovereign and distanced presentation of results gained in a research project that simulates quantitative journal studies with regard to their highly standardized formal and argumentative structure, outlining the research context, the theoretical approach, the methods, the results, and their discussion. In this structure, a (mostly brief) reflexivity section is integrated, elaborating on the process of collecting the empirical data, thus satisfying the requirements of qualitative research methodology that understands a certain reflexivity of the researcher as a characteristic of the research praxis (Flick, von Kardorff, & Steinke, 2005). Being presented as a particular quality feature that allows for making transparent and comprehensive the following data analysis, which is the core of the text, reflexivity often gains an instrumental character: As a means of methodological control of the researcher’s subjectivity that is constitutive of qualitative inquiry. This kind of writing of a qualitative research report, presented in many application-oriented academic textbooks as easily teachable and learnable due to clear structures and rules, is appreciated with regard to an anticipated improvement of the chance of getting an article published in international journals (see, for example, Chenail, Duffy, St. George, & Wulff, 2009; Drisko, 2005; Wolcott, 2002). From a critical perspective, however, texts written from this position are attested to foster boredom by undermining the potential of qualitative inquiry to make research interesting (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). Sandelowski and Barroso (2003) additionally hint at a striking discrepancy in the publication of many qualitative studies between their formulated methodological claim and the presentation of their findings.

The other position represents efforts of experimental writing that refer to more literary genres, as illustrated in auto-ethnographic approaches that entwine poetic and philosophical fragments with analytical and self-reflexive elements. Those efforts find a basis for legitimation in postmodern and poststructuralist understandings of the sciences. Therein, reflexivity is to be understood as an expression of the subjective experience of doing research, in which the involvement of the researcher in the research process, manifested in the dynamics of interaction and relationship between the researcher and the researched, gains decisive meaning in and for the interpretation. Such approaches of (re-)presenting the dynamic and process character of qualitative research have been given important spaces of articulation in a particular subfield, institutionalized in journals like Qualitative Inquiry or Forum: Qualitative Social Research and conferences like the annual International Conference on Qualitative Inquiry or the Berliner Methodentreffen (Berlin Meeting on Qualitative Methods) in Germany. In this subfield, the performative modes of experimental writing as a means of reflecting (and reflecting on) subjective research experiences and their epistemological and methodological foundations are subject to intense consideration and discussions. These discussions usually depict experimental writing as a kind of art that is hardly teachable on the basis of fixed rules but evolves as a highly individual style from the readings of paradigmatic and programmatic texts (see, for example, Averett & Soper, 2011; Ellis & Bochner, 2003; Gergen & Gergen, 2011; Rodgers, 2009). The constant endeavor to gain “deep” insights into the research dynamics and one’s own entanglement in the sense-making process, however, tends to result in a self-referential circling of subjective reflection, losing sight of the research object—a kind of reflection that Pierre Bourdieu criticized as “narcissistic” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). As Maton (2003) states,

In hermeneutic narcissism, knowledge claims shrink into ever-decreasing circles, leading to authors telling us only about themselves, for they feel unable to tell us anything about anyone else. . . . In doing so, such research often focuses on the individual author to the exclusion of everything else—the subject can thereby come to usurp the ostensible object of study. (p. 55)

The majority of published qualitative research texts demonstrate a proximity to one of these positions. In recent years, however, remarkable efforts have come to the fore that aim at a mediating position, which combines the more conventional presentation of research results with strong reflections on the research process and the role of the researcher’s subjectivity in the procedural development of findings. In the German context, Franz Breuer (2009) gives an illustration for such a mediating position in his book Vorgänger und Nachfolger (Predecessors and Successors), describing textual representation as a formal cross-over that goes beyond the presentation of his empirically grounded theoretical model through the introduction of experimental elements:

In this book I seek an . . . irritation of the conventional intellectual territories by mixing in different types of texts. The phenomenon of succession represents a fundamental anthropological problem. Therefore, it is addressed diversely in literature, poetry, fairy tales, and journalism. Sprinklings and illustrations of these territories enrich the text in many places. (p. 24; my translation from the German)

In this article, I would like to propose another mediating position in the field of writing (up) qualitative research findings. Arguing from a social-psychological perspective, I will focus on a reflexive integration of the interaction and relationship dynamics in the research encounter into the presentation of the joint production of meaning rather than on the formal transgression of scientific writing conventions. Although I purposefully inscribe this methodological proposal of understanding research vignettes as interpretative “reflexive accounts” (see, for example, Albertín Carbó, 2009; Flogen, 2011; Tuckermann & Rüegg-Stürm, 2010) of the research process into a “western” tradition of scientific knowledge production, the elaborated research vignette allows for innovative interlinking with decolonizing and decentering critiques and transgressions of this tradition that have been powerfully developed in indigenous methodologies in which, for instance, research is represented through story telling (see, for example, Iseke, 2013; Kovach, 2010). In this respect, the aim of this article is to contribute to the growing body of literature on the essential challenge of how qualitative research findings can adequately be (re-)presented in and through the writing process.

Vignettes have been used in psychological and sociological surveys studying perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes for some decades now (e.g., Hughes, 1998; Inadomi, Kikuchi, Ohta, & Tanaka, 2005; Martinez et al., 2014; Rooks, Raub, Setlen, & Tazelaar, 2000; Stolte, 1994). In this regard, they are conceptualized as “short stories about hypothetical characters in specific circumstances, to whose situation the interviewee is invited to react” (Finch, 1987, p. 105). The understanding of research vignettes developed in this article differs from such instrumental use for data gathering purposes. It takes up a more interpretive tradition of presenting significant single cases to illustrate complex research findings. This tradition is quite lively in health care and nursing research (e.g., Baker & Wigram, 2004; Chan, 2014: Kronenberg, Nachshoni, Neumann, & Gaoni, 1994). However, it transgresses this illustrating use, elaborated as a distinct method of interpretative inquiry through writing.

The research vignette as a qualitative method of writing is illustrated in the following section on the basis of a qualitative interview from a larger study on the psychosocial dynamics of HIV infections among gay men in Germany that was designed and conducted as a participatory peer research project (Kuehner & Langer, 2010; Langer, 2009, 2014). Subsequently, the theoretical and methodological foundation of the research vignette as a reflexive method of interpretation is outlined and some thoughts concerning its potential for practical use in qualitative research are presented.

“I Am Touched by Nothing Anymore.”—A Social Psychological Research Vignette

Lasting for only 64 minutes, the interview with Klaus was one of the shortest interviews that I conducted in the study “Positive Desire” to understand the psychosocial dynamics of sexual risk-taking behavior of gay men today. At the same time, it was one of the most stressful and irritating ones. I clearly remember our encounter, both of us sitting in the small consulting room of a Berlin AIDS service organization on these uncomfortable IKEA chairs, not even a meter apart, only the bare table with the recorder and two glasses of mineral water in between. Yet, I had the strong feeling that worlds were separating me from him, that an ocean of differences lay between us. I still feel today the inner distance and my feeling of oppression during the entire conversation when I recall the situation: All I wanted was to perform the interview quickly, executing the interview protocol in a routine manner with only the most important questions being asked. There was no desire to get to know him any more closely as a subject with a painful life story, hardly a trace of empathy.

During many interviews in the study, following Holstein’s and Gubrium’s conceptualization of the “active interview,” I brought in my own biography as a gay-identified HIV-positive man, helping to generate insightful “peer dialogues” (Kuehner & Langer, 2010). In the interview with Klaus, in contrast, I told nearly nothing about myself; there are exactly four lines in the transcript that contain personal information. My questions were rather brief and precise, sometimes even closed ones that restricted the possible answers and were definitely not meant to encourage my interview partner to share his life story: “How do you feel about that today?” “When did that happen?” “How long did it last?” . . . Questions like these seemed to suggest a latent hope that the respective answers, too, might turn out to be laconic. Soon after the most relevant questions had been addressed, phrases appeared that were aimed at forcing the interview to come to an end: “In any case, I would like to thank you very, very sincerely for so many and so personal details and so much participation in, in, in . . .” My entire competence in conducting interviews obviously failed, disclosing a frightening helplessness, as I was not even able to stutteringly name what I was thankful for. What was it that Klaus had involved me in during the last hour? Which insight for my study could I expect from an interview partner who reported “not to be part of that for 12 years”? What exactly did someone who had had sex in the mid-nineties for the last time want to tell me about the psychosocial backgrounds of the current HIV epidemic? What was the talk really good for?

A few days after the interview with Klaus, I became ill. For nearly 2 weeks I was unable to work. The other side of a committed social research practice: The stories of others not only enrich our professional (and sometimes also personal) life, but can also become a heavy burden sometimes. Thus, it took quite a long time after I got back to work, before I returned to the interview with Klaus, taking it from the stack of professionally prepared transcripts on my desk. As I was reading page after page with increasing excitement, the significance of the interview as one of the key interviews for the study became clearer. First, it paradigmatically deepened the understanding of the enormous experiences of exclusion and their far-reaching psychosocial consequences for an older generation of gays, guiding the data analysis toward a systematic search for vulnerability structures in homosexual life contexts that had not been so obvious with regard to their meaning for health behavior at the beginning of the study. Second, it opened up the analysis of the interaction dynamics as an essential element of the interpretation of the study data, because behind my indignation regarding the anticipated lack of interesting data for the study goal, several defense mechanisms can be identified. The rigid implementation of the interview manual, for instance, can be interpreted as a methodically rationalizing expression of rejecting counter-transference. Did I not belong to those “jubilation guys” (“Jubeltypen” in the German original) and “spring chickens” (“Hüpfer”) that feel at home in their nice gay life environment but were vehemently devaluated in Klaus’s narration. Did I not, quite regularly and even with pleasure, attend Gay Pride Day, this “entire stupid nonsense” that he couldn’t stand? And despite my general consent to his critique of a superficiality of the gay community, did I not deny his stereotypical labeling of “those staged, hyped up, those false affectations,” the “haha and trallala” of other gays that he reported made him sick? Did I not reject nearly aggressively every possible commonality based on sexual preference to hold on to a self-perception that I had cultivated for so many years? However, was his narrated “spoiled” life really that alien to me? Was it not my own gay identity that was on trial in the interview with Klaus?

In his remarkable, yet in the current methodological debate remarkably undervalued book, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences, the French ethno-psychoanalyst George Devereux (1967) notes that from a scientific point of view, the analysis of counter-transference provides manifold and rich data about the nature of human subjects because it is the examination of the observer that grants access to the essence of the observation situation (see, for example, Kuehner, 2011). For the researcher is inescapably (and frighteningly) ensnared in the phenomenon under study, she or he has to cope with the trouble that lies, as Alain Giami (2001) writes in his discussion of Devereux’ work, in

the difficulty in clearly distinguishing materials that come from outside (the subject, the field) and from inside (his or her emotional reactions). The researcher has to struggle with these emotional reactions and anxieties. . . . The researcher is, in one way or another, the subject and the object of the knowledge that he/she elaborates. (p. 6)

In this respect, a critical reflection of the interaction dynamic allows for integrating “[h]is anxieties, his defense maneuvers, his research strategies, his ‘decisions’ (=his attributions of a meaning to his observations)” (Devereux, 1967, p. XIX) into the analysis of the data, taking the irritations in the research encounter—here, the “situational failures” of the interview conduction—as significant starting points of interpretation.

However, although my reactions in the interview can be explained on the basis of my own biography as a gay-identified HIV-positive social psychologist of a younger post-AIDS generation, I deeply regret my behavior. “I actually feel like an outsider in the group [of homosexuals; P.C.L.],” Klaus confesses wearily near the end of the interview. “Not belonging to it because I do not feel like a typical representative.” In my own paradoxical desire for unique belonging, I seemed to have acted like a “typical representative,” reproducing Klaus’ position of a social outsider in and through the interview.

But what did his outsider position consist of? What exactly was it that I thought I would need to distance myself from so vehemently? Which biographical experiences separated us? And what did all that have to do with HIV? At the time the interview took place, Klaus was 56 years old. Born in 1950 in a small village in the north of Western Germany, he grew up in the social environment of the post-war-era, which was shaped by conservative conceptions of sexuality, manifested in intensifications of the persecution and penalization of homosexuals by police and courts.

The gradual reconstruction of a domesticated heterosexuality coincided with a renewed commitment to the criminalization of homosexuality among men. Although initially there was a moment of openness and freedom with regard to homosexual activity among men in the postwar period, it did not last long. While antisemitism in the postwar period became largely confined to the private sphere and was replaced by a (however superficial) official philosemitism, homophobia reacquired respectability. Nazi-era assumptions about sexual orientation profoundly shaped postwar approaches to the subject. (Herzog, 2005, p. 88f.)

In a redraft of the German criminal code, dated in 1962, an official law committee still recommended to the federal parliament to retain paragraph 175, which had criminalized homosexual acts since the late 19th century and had been ratcheted by the National Socialists, reasoning that the “overwhelming majority of the German population sees sexual relations between men as a contemptible aberration that is likely to subvert character and destroy moral feeling” (cited in Herzog, 2005, p. 129f). The long history of the criminalization of homosexuality in the German Federal Republic was loosened only in 1969 in times of a general social liberalization and ended with its abolishment as late as 1994 (in the German Democratic Republic, in contrast, persecution of homosexuals stopped in 1957; the respective paragraph was repealed in 1968). For this process, the political and juridical discourse had played an important role. Homophobic and psychopathologizing patterns of prejudice, nevertheless, persisted (and still persist) and affected (and still affect) everyday experiences of homosexuality in far-reaching ways, difficult to eliminate.

This social background is reflected in Klaus’ story quite distinctly. It is remarkable, for instance, that he referred to the term “gay” only once in the entire interview. He ascribed its use in a pejorative and trivializing way to an imagined observer of a Gay Pride parade as a representative of the heterosexual societal majority: “Really funny again, those gays.” For “homosexuals,” too, there are only two quotations in the interview. In the first one, Klaus spoke about a gay man who was trying to denounce him in his village after the end of a brief affair:

It was horrifying. And then he got back and then I got a nasty letter that he had written, I would be the world’s top homosexual. He wanted to shaft me. He thought someone would find the letter, someone else, I guess.

The equalization of homosexuality and social exclusion—“For heaven’s sake, how will that work, here in the village, that’s impossible”—created continuous anxiety about being disclosed and reflected internalized experiences of social stigmatizing practices. For Klaus, homosexuality was nothing to live openly. In the tradition of a homosexual subculture it was rather present(ed) through insinuations and ambiguous signals, as the second quotation demonstrates. A pen pal from Sweden had “made some indications once that he had quite a lot of homosexuals among his acquaintances,” a comment that he had read—“between the lines”—as a chiffre for the homosexuality of his pen pal. In this regard, Klaus’s perception of homosexuality in 2007 corresponded to Lord Douglas’s (1896) proverbial “love that dare not speak its name”: “I speak very suggestively. I don’t have it on my forehead. But whoever listens carefully can imagine what the thing is about.” The “it” and the “thing” obviously refer to his homosexuality, appearing as a reduced, reified, and estranged exterior to which Klaus hardly finds access in his speech. An affirmative reference to homosexuality does not seem to be an option; only a stigmatized view, a possible mark on the forehead, remains. However, even the mark is rejected as not being appropriate anymore. In the entire interview, there are only negative references to a sense of not belonging, to the experience of not being part of it. There is a significant passage of the interview, in which Klaus struggles to find words in which to describe himself best. In this passage, he suddenly interrupts (“I, I am so . . . ”) and resignedly asserts after a longer pause, “I do not know what I am.” Not who, but what he might be, is contested; as an objectified “what” his sexual “I” is extinguished in the speech act, resulting in a permanent repetition in his everyday life:

I come home, sit down in front of the telly and let the time pass by. In the morning the alarm clock rings, I go to work, I come home, sit in front of the telly and let the time pass by.

Apparently uninvolved, untouched, and robot-like: “Sometimes I have the feeling that I do not have a heart anymore. At this place I have kind of hard skin. I am touched by nothing anymore.”

It might have been the pure destruction of any possibility of a positively connoted gay identity that scared me in the interview with Klaus. Since my coming out, my gayness has never appeared problematic to me. Hardly surprisingly, in the mirror that Klaus presented in his story, I could not recognize myself. It reflected a weird image of inescapable loneliness: “I, I, I, I, I . . . I have nothing anymore.” The multiple repetition of the “I” he tried to find ultimately dissolves in the emphasized “nothing.”

In the course of the analysis of the interview, I was reminded of an article by Matthias Waltz (2001), addressing Lacanian “topologies of desire” in the current pop culture:

Being alone has two quite different meanings in a symbolic and in an imaginary context. Since symbolic relations are internalized, the subject has the other in itself, through which it has its identifications and its existence as a person. The imaginary identifications, however, always remain dependent on the other person, on the love, the admiration from others, on ridicule by others. They do not produce a subject who “carries within itself” a world, but a subject that is abandoned, if it is not supported by the clique. What this subject of imaginary identification looks for is . . . a space and a connection with others outside this stressful world of cliques, but which means now: out of every world. (my translation of the German)

In the imaginary, always unstable identification with the image, the “real” (in the Lacanian terminology) needs to be excluded, while always ready to break in. So, it seems that it was the horror of this “real” that I had felt and could not stand in the interview with Klaus. In addition, there was his depressing tale of growing up in a home that was far away from notions of familial security and my own childhood experiences: In his story, Klaus’s mother “arrived at my father’s farm [after war-related expulsion; PCL] and then probably there was the lust of the flesh [laughs], I was the result.” Seeing himself as a mere accident of the “lust of the flesh” of his parents, who never married and had “probably not learned to deal with each other lovingly,” he confessed, “I’m just a mistake.” He bundled all these experiences in a short but significant reminiscence: “I never got a goodnight kiss.”

Given these experiences, it is not surprising that the longing for love and security that he missed so explicitly in his childhood posed a central theme in Klaus’s stories about his gay life in different major Western German cities. In the gay scene, which he had gotten to know from the mid-1970s and to which he was “introduced” by a colleague from work, this longing apparently did not come true.

It was a scene long before its “collective coming out” (Woltersdorff, 2005), before the existence of an openly accessible community structure, before the growing social acceptance of gay life in public, a scene in which a socially recognized gay identity was not possible or conceivable, or, in Judith Butler’s (1990) term, intelligible. And, it was a scene that turned out not to be as inclusive and tolerant as he had thought and hoped, but that was deeply influenced by homo-normative practices that repeatedly confronted him with painful experiences of exclusion.

For Klaus, his hope of emotional closeness in a relationship became an utopia whose inaccessibility had led to the complete withdrawal from the gay life world, which has already been depicted by the image of the hard skin as a substitute for his heart. He does “not feel like disclosing himself or confiding in someone anymore.” His remark stated above, that he is no longer touched by anything, can be understood quite literally: “Somehow I couldn’t bear any more touches.” In Klaus’s story, the skin functions as the intersection of outer and inner contact, as a place of love that he has never received. Therefore, it seems almost consistent that the first signs of his HIV infection, which he had received in his only ever relationship in the mid-1980s from his friend who soon afterward died of complications from AIDS, had been “very terrible itchiness”: “I could have scratched my back till it bled.”

The disappointment of his hopes and dreams was accompanied by a splitting-off of sexuality from emotionality: “And now, if you do not get this, then you’ll just want to have fun.” However, he did not find satisfaction in this; the feeling of emptiness deepened further and further. Consequently, there was nothing else but to flee into fictions in which he saw his dreams being living representatively: “Sometimes I take pleasure in beautiful movies and think: Oh, it could be like this.” At this point of the interview, talking about the romantic comedy Tough Guys, which he cites as a personally touching film, I brought into the conversation one of my own experiences, a quick note on Brokeback Mountain, the tragic staging of an impossible love between two men in the conservative social environment of the Midwestern United States of the 1950s, mentioning, “It’s very sad, I think.” While the film, especially in the final sequence, where, following the death of one of the protagonists, the camera view moved out of the window of a lonely caravan into a deserted field, gives expression to my horror, Klaus commented that the movie had not affected him at all. Was the movie too realistic, a Hollywood-like imprint of his own life? In any case, it ran contrary to his own idealized image of America as a land of unlimited possibilities, of freedom: “If I were kind of crazy right now, I’ll wish that I had been born in America, where the sun always shines.”

In and through his life story, Klaus reveals a deeply incoherent picture of himself that splits the ideal and reality far apart. This becomes tangible also in the narration when evaluative statements run counter to what has just been narrated. In their empirical study on the construction of identity in the postmodern era, Heiner Keupp et al. (1999) emphasize “that coherence in a procedural sense still plays a central role for the identity work of subjects in everyday life, and its the omission leads to serious emotional and health consequences” (p. 246). The consequences for Klaus’s mental and physical health are very obvious in the interview. Mentally, in the 1980s, he went to a “shrink,” who could not help him; a psychiatrist, to whom he went later, reinforced his sense of being socially excluded by her manner, which he perceived as prejudiced and derogatory: “And there I got the answer of this stupid doctor immediately: Oh, you’re one of those cruising around here in the park.”

Physically, Klaus regard his HIV infection as the inevitable outcome of a long history of sexual diseases. After having contracted several diseases like gonorrhea and hepatitis A and B, when the AIDS topic came into the media in the mid-1980s, it was clear for him: “Well, then you’re game.” However, the awareness of having probably been infected with HIV in the 1980s barely seemed to touch him. He was diagnosed with HIV only in 2003, when he was admitted to hospital with multiple opportunistic infections, and the test for HIV just confirmed the obvious: “I said [to the practitioner; P.C.L.], do you know what, just do it, I fucking don’t care.” In this sequence, a fatalism becomes evident that affects his entire life. There are no resources available to Klaus to cope with the manifold psychosocial strains: no helpful social networks, no family support, and no healthy professional environment. His conclusion is frighteningly consistent: “My life is over.”

Theoretical Foundations of the Research Vignette as a Reflexive Method of Interpretation

The exemplarily presented research vignette is one of six that framed the interpretation of the 58 interviews conducted in the study “Positive Desire.” Its integration in the research report (Langer, 2009) was aimed at identifying and illustrating essential aspects for the understanding of the HIV infection dynamics that guided the detailed narration analysis in the subsequent chapter. It illustrated the influence of generation-specific and rural socialization experiences on the identity construction of gay men, or more precisely, on processes of troubling (and sometimes even spoiling) sexual identities through internalization of heteronormative discourses. The starting point of the illustration was a critical reflection on the affects that led to the perception of the interview as “difficult” and somehow “unacceptable” already in its execution and in the first phase of the interpretation of the study material. In the process of writing the research vignette, a psychoanalytically informed interpretation was carried out in which the critical reflection of the relationship dynamic and the construction of my own subjectivity and identity related to it were woven into an analysis of the manifest content of the interview and the contextualization of the findings within relevant theoretical approaches. With regard to the textual genre, the research vignette also draws on ethnographic efforts toward a narrative “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) to make the interview situation more lively to the reader and to let her or him participate in the successive and sometimes tentative progress of interpretation. Modifying the title of an essay by the German 19th-century writer Heinrich von Kleist (2004)—On the Gradual Production of Thought Whilst Speaking—one could speak of a gradual production of interpretation while (or in/through) writing.

From a methodological point of view, however, the question has to be answered how this style of presenting qualitative research can be legitimated. First, the research vignette responds to the understanding of the interview as a dynamic process of joint production of meaning in a given artificially constructed research context. This understanding is based on the considerations of Atkinson and Silverman (1997), who pointedly speak about the current “interview society” as a phenomenon that is itself in need of explanation, because it obviously fulfills certain functions. Referring to Foucault’s (1978) analysis of the tradition of confession, the authors suggest that this phenomenon reflects a “general Zeitgeist in which the production of selves and lives is accorded special significance” (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997, p. 313). Their critique points to the naïve assumption of a sudden access to the subjective reality of respondents and their inner world and biographical experiences in the interview: “Narrative is celebrated as the revelation of the personal and the interview as the research device for its authentic elicitation. Ironically, a social constructionist discourse, focused on narrative structures, is made to serve a Romantic agenda” (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997, p. 318). Instead of discovering an “authentic” self in the interview narration, the very “authentic self” is produced performatively as a discursive effect in the context of constructs such as identity and subjectivity: “This is because interviewer and interviewee collaborate in the reconstruction of a common and unitary construction of the self” (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997, p. 314). Atkinson’s and Silverman’s considerations have to be understood against the background of a narrative turn and postmodern as well as poststructuralist theories that have resonated strongly in parts of the qualitative research debates. On one hand, the interview is undoubtedly “the creation of an unnatural social situation, introduced by a researcher, for the purpose of polite interrogation” (Kellehear, 1996, p. 98), always charged with power relations and asymmetries. On the other hand, the social world is constructed interactively in an interview, taking up a variety of socioculturally specific narratives and discursive practices: “stories and narratives depend upon communities that will create and hear those stories: social worlds, interpretive communities, communities of memory” (Plummer, 1995, p. 145). In this respect, the interview is, in the first place, an expression of the joint co-construction of meaning in this particular situation with these particular interview partners.

Reflexivity thus aims at an understanding of the interaction dynamics. A privileged starting point for the analysis is based on the subjectivity of the researcher—her or his scientific location, assumptions, emotions, and strategies. The focus of knowledge production lies in “the knowing relation between the researcher and the researched. The quality of the research is directly a result of the quality of the relation” (Gunzenhauser, 2006, p. 633).

Taking the postmodern knowledge paradigm seriously, the concept of reflexivity in relation to the self-reflection of the researcher is problematic. Although a construction process of the researched subject, which is expressed in the interview narration, is commonly presumed, the subject position of the researcher is usually presupposed. What exactly “do reflective researchers see when they look in the mirror, and how much control do they have over what they see” (Brown, 2008, p. 402)? Slavoj Žižek’s (1996) answer, based on the poststructuralist reading of Lacan, is “[W]hen I speak, I always constitute a virtual place of enunciation from which I speak, yet this is never directly ‘me’” (p. 194). According to this, reflexivity does not refer to a solid researcher subject, but has to take into account that this particular subject is constituted performatively in the interview interaction with the interviewee. For this purpose, the techniques of a psychoanalytic social psychology (Brockhaus, 1993) may be particularly useful. They understand the “engagement with irritations and ‘disturbances’ that are triggered by the research situations and relationships [as] data of knowledge production, as statements about the research situation” (Heizmann, 2003, p. 4; see also, Oester, 1992).

Given that the interaction situation in question is a unique and singular performance, however, how can we account for the conclusions drawn from its interpretation and extrapolate a general value or significance from this ostensibly unparalleled event? ¹ Saying that the subjectivities of both the interviewee and the interviewer are performatively produced in the research encounter does not mean that they are arbitrary and detached from the lived and embodied experience of the research partners. I am just saying that the concept of an autonomous, sovereign, and self-aware Cartesian subject is neither necessary nor useful to understand the different layers of biographical meaning that palimpsest-like overlap in and shape the interview situation. I would rather propose a relational view on subjectivity (see, for example, McAfee, 2000, from a philosophical, and Benjamin, 2010, from a psychoanalytic perspective) and argue that analytically reflecting on the effects the particular interaction situation has on the relational performance of the selves and the presentation of the biographical narrations allow for transgressing the interview situation toward a more differentiated interpretative reconstruction of the “lived experiences”—to borrow a term from Frantz Fanon (1967).

Second, the presented research vignette is related to George Devereux’s (1967) (ethno-)psychoanalytic concepts (see Angela Kuehner’s article in this issue). It follows the premise that “Not the study of the subject, but that of the observer gives us access to the essence of the observational situation” (Devereux, 1967, p. XIX; emphasis in the original). From the reflection of “disturbances” experienced in the research situation, important research insights can be extrapolated:

Since the existence of the observer, his observational activities and anxieties (even in self observation) produce distortions, . . . any effective behavioral science methodology must treat these disturbances as the most significant and characteristic data of behavioral science research. (Devereux, 1967, p. XVII)

In this sense, reflexivity proves not to be a way of managing subjectivity, but a strategy of obtaining knowledge about the object itself, for the observable phenomena of (counter-)transference directly refer to it.

Third, in the writing process, the research vignette reflects the relationship dynamics in the research situation that causes irritations, taking them as a kind of guide for the (re-)construction of the meaning and addressing the reader as a partner in the interpretation process. Instead of being presented as a final product of the process of data analysis, the interpretation becomes procedurally dynamic and associatively broken, thus, representing a writing to be followed in reading, at the same time allowing for other associations and different readings: The story that is told can always be told otherwise. Referring to a rhizomatous, poststructuralist knowledge production (see Barthes, 1974), the research vignette, therefore, invites the reader as a co-producer of meaning to the interpretation process, giving her or him as the addressee of a communicative validation of the findings authority in the interpretation of the empirical material.

Some Thoughts Concerning the Practical Use of Research Vignettes

The given research vignette was developed as part of a formally more conventional presentation of the study on the psychosocial dynamics of HIV-related risk behavior, following the usual elaboration of the context, theoretical approach, and methodology of the study and preparing for the presentation of the study results and their further discussion. It is therefore not a “classic” case study that can stand on its own. Rather, it represents a—psychoanalytically founded—transfer of principles of ethnographic writing on dealing with specific peer-interview encounters that combines the reflection of the research relationship, the presentation of the interpretive findings, and their theoretical embedding in a narrative way.

As a methodological expression of a research attitude in which the reflexive integration of the articulation of subjectivity functions as a starting point of the production of meaning—in which the speaking/writing subject always speaks/writes from the place of desire of the Other (Lacan, 2004)—the research vignette is not bound to certain methods of data collection (and analysis), for example, an interview study, and can be transferred to different contexts.

It can be used in more conventionally presented qualitative studies, can be extended by including questions regarding the research context and the methodology, and can be linked to more experimental forms of writing. Its narrative form and subjective situatedness may, for instance, be affiliated with indigenous methodologies that address research experience by means of storytelling and decolonize notions of subjectivity (see, for example, Kovach, 2010; Wright et al., 2012).

As part of “Western” knowledge production, the research vignette can have (at least) four functions that are not meant to be exclusive, but can, in many cases, merge into one another. First, the research vignette can have an illustrative function by bringing research findings in a contextualizing narration closer to readers who may have little contact to qualitative research (or the respective field), like politicians, journalists, or research grantors as addressees of research communication. Second, it can have an identifying function by sharing affects of the researchers, making them reflectively comprehensible. This seems to be particularly important for practitioners in the research field, who can recognize and understand their own emotions in their practice “in the mirror of the other.” Third, the research vignette may receive an exploratory function by making the interpretation process procedurally comprehensible, while preparing for the presentation of the condensed results. Finally, it provides a paradigmatic function by emphasizing the essential interpretive results, developing a separate case study on the basis of a research vignette.

From a social constructivist perspective, the research vignette provides the opportunity to intimately integrate the reader into the research process, thus opening up a dialogic space between the researcher, who tells his or her story, and the reader, who becomes a critical partner in the interpretation process. At the same time, situational failures that are experiences in the research process do not remain excluded, but are taken as a privileged starting point of understanding in the context of a critical interpretation practice, complying with the requirements of reflexive knowledge production (see Langer, Kuehner, & Schweder, 2013).

With regard to “difficult” research experiences, Weiner-Levy and Popper-Giveon (2013) write about the “‘dark matter’ of qualitative research,” which is likely to be suppressed and eliminated from the presentation of findings. They plead for sharing this information with the readers: “We believe that transparency intensifies and enriches research rather than harming it. At times, fixed patterns of suppression and obscuration shape and reflect broader social and political realities” (Weiner-Levy & Popper-Giveon, 2013, p. 2187). Referring to Atkinson, they hint at the opportunities of “reflexive accounts” as “fairy tales of quests—designed to support the credibility of the research” (Weiner-Levy & Popper-Giveon, 2013, p. 2181):

In the reflexive or even “confessional” accounts, the ethnographers are expected to “tell it like it was” and reveal the personal and practical issues they experienced in the course of their fieldwork. . . . Although confessional autobiographical papers appear intimate and naive, they represent, in fact, a particular genre; conventional in form and culturally shaped. (Weiner-Levy & Popper-Giveon, 2013, p. 2180f.)

In this sense, this article is intended as a stimulus for the use of research vignettes as “reflexive accounts” of critical social science research by means of a “crystallization” that, as Norman Denzin (2012) writes,

Combines multiple forms of analysis and genres of representation into a coherent text. Crystallization seeks to produce thick, complex interpretation. It uses more than one writing genre. It deploys multiple forms of analysis, reflexively embeds the researcher’s self in the inquiry process and eschews positivist claims to objectivity. (p. 84)