Seducing or Manipulating the Participants? A Novice Researcher’s Reflexive Exploration of Ethical Challenges in Elite Interviews

Abstract

Researchers rarely reflect on ethical challenges in elite interviews, particularly those related to potential harm towards elite interviewees. This article employs reflexivity, drawing on the concepts of procedural ethics and ethics in practice, to explore such challenges, written in response to a professor’s comment that the author’s intention to attract potential participants appears to be seduction or manipulation. Based on the author’s experiences as a PhD student interviewing top-level university leaders in Norway, the article discusses ethical challenges in elite interviews from three aspects. First, it recognises the gaps in procedural ethics, namely the paradoxes in current ethical frameworks that may leave elite participants vulnerable to both seduction and manipulation. Second, it clarifies the distinction between attraction and seduction and discusses how novice researchers may ethically attract, rather than seduce, potential elite participants - an ethical challenge many researchers face before conducting elite interviews. Third, it analyses how elite participants may be vulnerable to manipulation during and after interviews, where epistemic capital held by researchers outweighs the social and cultural capital of interviewees in the research field. The article concludes by summarising the key methodological contributions and outlining several directions for future research on this under-explored topic.

Keywords

elite interviews reflexivity attraction seduction manipulation

1. Background: When Attraction Sounds Like Seduction or Manipulation

This article responds to a professor’s comments on my assignment draft for a PhD course on qualitative inquiry that I took before collecting data from elite interviewees. In this course, every student was required to submit a draft outlining their qualitative research puzzle before the final assignment. I focused on conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews with top-level university leaders and wrote: “I will go into details in discussing the influences shaping in-depth interview using my project as an example, such as how I should design interview questions based on my sub-research questions, what I should put in the interview guide in addition to the interview questions to attract my potential participants, how I should treat the interview guide during the interviews, how I should treat my interviewees, what I should prepare for motivating me and my interviewees to be active participants, should I use pilot interview and bracketing interview and why.” A professor responsible for the course commented aside, “This is an awkward goal. I believe… sounds like you are seducing them or manipulating them somehow to have an interest in participating in the study.” Upon reading such a comment, I struggled to understand how “attraction” could be associated with “seduction” or “manipulation”, particularly in the context of elite interviews.

My doctoral project investigates top-level leadership in Norwegian universities, drawing primarily on interview data with rectors, pro-rectors, vice-rectors, and university directors. As many researchers have noted (Bradshaw, 2001; Harvey, 2010; Liu, 2018; Ma et al., 2021; Niu, 2024), gaining access to senior organisational leaders remains a persistent challenge for those conducting elite interviews. Having previously experienced similar difficulties in engaging top-level leaders in my home country, I was concerned at the outset that my PhD project might stall due to the problems in recruiting sufficient participants - a concern I believed was entirely understandable. To my surprise, however, I successfully recruited 29 interviewees out of the 52 top-level leaders in Norwegian universities, and my participants represented all ten Norwegian universities¹. After completing data collection, I came to understand the professor’s remark in a new light. I realised that seduction and manipulation in elite interviews were not as distant from researchers as I had initially assumed and that my experiences in data collection could illustrate the ethical challenges in this regard.

2. Applying Reflexivity in Elite Interviews

Researchers rarely apply reflexivity in ethical challenges of elite interviews (Lancaster, 2017; Niu, 2024), even though they devote considerable attention to ethical issues when interviewing vulnerable populations such as migrants (Caeymaex et al., 2023), children (Montreuil et al., 2021) and youth (Woodgate et al., 2017). This disparity may reflect the differing power relations between researchers and participants in interviews with elites compared to those with vulnerable populations. Elites are typically defined as individuals who hold high social status (Niu, 2024, p. 3), occupy powerful positions (Natow, 2020, p. 160) or possess specialised expertise (Morris, 2009, p. 209). Interviewing elites is more akin to “studying up” (Niu, 2024, p. 2), in which the power imbalance tends to favour the interviewees rather than the researchers. In contrast, interviewing vulnerable populations may be considered “studying down” (Niu, 2024, p. 2), a practice thought to risk exacerbating participants’ vulnerability, creating greater potential for ethical harm, and therefore requiring special attention.

Reflexivity has increasingly gained recognition and application in qualitative studies (Finefter-Rosenbluh, 2017; Lees et al., 2022). It embraces the subjectivity of researchers (Mason-Bish, 2019; Olmos-Vega et al., 2023) and entails ongoing critical reflection on both the knowledge produced and how it is generated throughout the research process (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004). Moreover, reflexivity could serve as a valuable theoretical lens for reflecting on and evaluating all aspects of the research process, bridging procedural ethics within institutional review and the lived realities of ethics in practice (de Groot et al., 2019; Lees et al., 2022). Guillemin and Gillam (2004) conceptualise research ethics as comprising both procedural ethics and ethics in practice. Procedural ethics involves obtaining approval from a relevant ethics committee to conduct research with human participants, primarily to ensure their protection (Connor et al., 2018; Scheytt & Pflüger, 2024). Ethics in practice refers to everyday ethical issues that arise during the research process, often beyond the committee’s oversight (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004). Despite being limited to norms, directives, and formal approval (Taquette & Borges da Matta Souza, 2022), procedural ethics plays a crucial role in compelling researchers to uphold and reflect on the fundamental principles of research integrity and underpins ethics governance across various types of research. Ethics in practice, meanwhile, may be more closely aligned with qualitative research, as it enables researchers to address “ethically important moments” (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004, p. 277) – often “subtle and unpredictable” (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004, p. 262) – throughout the research process.

This article applies reflexivity to explore the ethical challenges of potential seduction and manipulation in elite interviews, drawing on my experiences as a PhD student interviewing top-level university leaders in Norway. The article is mainly structured into three sections. First, it examines how the gaps in procedural ethics may create potential for both seduction and manipulation in elite interviews. Second, it distinguishes between attraction and seduction and proposes an ethical strategy for attracting potential participants into elite interviews. Third, it analyses the mechanisms through which manipulation may occur once interviews begin. The second and third sections address ethical challenges in practice. The article concludes with its methodological contributions and suggestions for how future researchers may further develop these initial insights.

3. Procedural Paradoxes: Vulnerability to Seduction and Manipulation

Both seduction (Groes, 2017; Sepp, 2012) and manipulation (Boynton et al., 2013; Mandava & Millum, 2013) violate research ethics, because they involve deceiving participants to serve the researcher’s own interests. The Cambridge Dictionary defines seducing as “to persuade or trick someone into doing something by making it very attractive” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.-a) and manipulating as “to control or influence something or someone so that you get an advantage, often unfairly or dishonestly” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.-b).

Although most countries require ethical review (Tapscott & Machón, 2025) to prevent such misconduct and safeguard ethical integrity, the effectiveness of these usually rigid ethical frameworks, developed primarily to protect participants (Connor et al., 2018; Scheytt & Pflüger, 2024), may be limited. In Norway, ethics governance is overseen by Sikt – Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. Like many researchers, I strictly complied with Sikt’s procedures: submitting the required application along with an information letter and consent form, as well as an interview guide; beginning data collection only after approval; and subsequently obtaining consent from my interviewees. Importantly, the template provided by Sikt is comprehensive, placing the consent form immediately after the information letter and requiring all the information provided: project purpose, responsible institution, reason for participant invitation, description of participation, voluntary participation statement, data storage and use, data management at project end, participants’ rights, legal basis for data processing, sources for further information (including researcher and institutional contacts), and participant signature confirming consent. However, participants do not always read the information letter and consent documents carefully (Douglas et al., 2021; Geier et al., 2021; Parfenova et al., 2024), despite the considerable time researchers spend preparing these materials and following each step of the ethical review process. At the end of each interview, I usually asked whether the interviewee had anything to add or suggest. On two occasions, leaders inquired about the outcome or use of the interviews, even though both the invitation email and the information letter had clearly stated that my study was a PhD project primarily based on interview data.

When elite interviewees do not take the information letter and consent form seriously, they may become vulnerable to either manipulation or seduction. Such potential ethical harm could be traced to the gaps in procedural ethics, namely, the paradoxes inherent in the ethical frameworks.

First and foremost, the current ethical frameworks operate within a paternalistic model (Connor et al., 2018) that neglects participants’ perspectives and needs, but in the name of protecting them. Moreover, this appears to be a widespread flaw in research ethics governance across many countries, including the United States (Schrag, 2010), the United Kingdom (Hammersley, 2009), Canada (van den Hoonaard, 2011), Korea (Chou et al., 2024), Japan (Chou et al., 2024) and Norway. Taking the information letter and consent form prescribed by Sikt as an example, the designers prioritise comprehensive disclosure of the research project and participants’ rights. The underlying assumption is that more information ensures better protection. However, this approach overlooks participants’ actual capacity to process and understand the information provided. Research indicates that lengthy documents are less likely to be read carefully and are less well understood than shorter ones (Perrault & Nazione, 2016). This raises concern about the paternalistic approach to procedural ethics (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004), which may be especially problematic in elite interviews, where participants may have little time to review the information letter and consent form in detail.

More paradoxically, even when researchers and participants fully comply with ethical procedures, such as securing approval, providing information, and giving consent, the effect may protect researchers more than participants. Participants are, in principle, free to withdraw from a study at any stage. In practice, however, they may have to bear substantive consequences of ethical breaches, precisely because they provide personal data. In contrast, researchers may mitigate responsibility by pointing to their compliance with ethical procedures. In this way, adherence becomes more of a “contractual ritual” (Caeymaex et al., 2023, p. 7) than a substantive safeguard for participants.

The paradoxes of procedural ethics may leave participants, including elite interviewees, vulnerable to seduction and manipulation during the research process. This issue ought to be acknowledged and addressed by ethics governance bodies.

4. Ethical Recruitment as Attraction Rather Than Seduction

Recruiting participants for elite interviews is widely recognised as challenging, especially for novice researchers, yet the process and conditions of recruitment are often under-communicated (Grant et al., 2025; Negrin et al., 2022). Given the flexibility of qualitative research design (Scheytt & Pflüger, 2024), participant recruitment in elite interviews could be ethically complex and subject to scrutiny.

There is a fundamental difference between seducing and attracting potential participants into interviews. Seduction relies on deception or concealment to secure sufficient participants, whereas attraction achieves this by thoughtfully analysing recruitment challenges and addressing them in a targeted and honest manner. The former constitutes serious ethical misconduct, but the latter could be a legitimate strategy that researchers should consider in advance and subsequently demonstrate how their recruitment strategy reflects attraction rather than seduction. Surprisingly, however, extant literature appears to offer little explicit distinction between seduction and attraction in elite interviews. Moreover, descriptions of seduction are ambiguous rather than critical, using phrases such as “the dance of seduction” (Ryan & Lewer, 2012) and “seductive excitement” (Phillips, 1998). Some researchers even treat seduction as a useful tool for managing difficult, uncomfortable moments during elite interviews (Darbi & Hall, 2014).

Seducing potential participants into elite interviews should be strictly prohibited. By contrast, identifying recruitment challenges and preparing appropriate countermeasures to attract participants’ attention is an integral part of the research groundwork and should be encouraged, especially for novice researchers. I began by reflecting on the greatest challenge in recruiting interviewees. Although I achieved a participation rate of 56%, beyond my expectations, this result may not be unexpected, since elites in democratic societies such as Norway are generally more accessible than in authoritarian contexts (Ntienjom Mbohou & Tomkinson, 2022). This observation accords with my cross-cultural experiences. In Norway, the power distance between top-level university leaders and PhD students is considerably smaller than that in my home country. For instance, leaders’ office locations and contact information are publicly available on university websites, and students could address them directly by their given name. I was confident that I could invite potential participants to the interviews by email. While access to elites was less of a barrier than for other novice researchers (Liu, 2018), the real difficulty was that such invitations could be easily ignored because of the leaders’ demanding schedules. The question, then, was how my invitation emails could capture the attention of senior university leaders. My strategy was to “put myself in their shoes” when deliberating on the content, language, length and delivery mode of the invitation email.

Drawing on relational autonomy (Le et al., 2024), researchers could exercise agency to cultivate a supportive relationship with potential participants. Securing their initial attention requires the invitation email to be clear and encouraging so that it elicits engagement rather than confusion or indifference. To this end, I deliberately formulated three key points to communicate. First, I emphasised the strong relevance of my PhD project to their daily work, outlining its focus on top-level leadership during Norwegian higher education transformation over recent decades. The second point concerned their potential contribution to social science research by providing data that could deepen the understanding of institutional dynamics and pluralistic contexts in contemporary Norwegian universities. Third, I articulated their role in supporting the scholarly development of a young researcher in academic leadership. I concluded the email with a brief overview of my research experiences and a link to a co-authored article published in a leading higher education journal. In retrospect, the second and third points may have served as implicit incentives that evoked a sense of responsibility among higher education leaders, thereby potentially improving participation rates. Three leaders described my project as exciting and/or important when confirming their participation. During one interview, with a few minutes remaining, I asked the interviewee what had motivated her to support my project after reading my email. She replied: “I always try to be positive when PhD students that need something for their field work, because we are so dependent on that our PhD students succeed... of course, also, since your topic is relevant to me, like I understand that I am a good case for you, then I just want to contribute. So, I think it is as easy as that.”

Beyond the substantive content of the invitation email, the choice of language is also crucial. When the interviewers’ language abilities allow, using a language more familiar to the interviewees, such as their mother tongue, may yield unexpectedly favourable effects. Given that most senior university leaders in Norway are Norwegian, I chose to write the invitation email in Norwegian rather than English. Based on my experience in Norway, I knew that either language was feasible, as most Norwegians are good at English, and I managed to write in both. However, Norwegian is generally more acceptable in everyday communication. While living in Northern Norway, I observed that people often felt more comfortable using Norwegian, even though they were fluent in English. As an international student, I have also found that using someone’s mother tongue could effectively bridge cultural and national boundaries. For example, when people greeted me in my native language upon first meeting, it immediately caught my attention and encouraged deeper engagement in conversation.

In addition, keeping the invitation email brief is important for securing participation from elite interviewees, who usually have demanding schedules. Lengthy messages may burden busy leaders and reduce the likelihood of a positive response. After deciding on the email’s content and language, I focused on managing its length. The final version contained approximately 350 words. Before sending it out, I asked several Norwegian friends to estimate the reading time, and all reported around two minutes. This reassured me that the email was concise enough to convey the key information without taking up much of their time.

Finally, whether the invitation is sent as a mass mailing or as an individually tailored message may also affect the participation rate. When the population is not very large, individual invitations are preferable. Research has demonstrated the effectiveness of personalisation in email communication; for example, adding a recipient’s name raises the probability of the message being opened by 20% (Sahni et al., 2018). I personalised each invitation by addressing leaders individually with “Dear [Name]” and sending the emails separately. This approach more directly signalled to each leader that I was exactly seeking his or her support, thereby probably increasing the likelihood of capturing the attention compared to a mass email. Moreover, sending emails individually could better convey the researcher’s respect for each recipient.

While adopting participants’ perspectives and presenting key, truthful information may help capture their immediate attention, these efforts alone may not be adequate to rule out seduction. It’s therefore indispensable to furnish potential participants with comprehensive and transparent project information. This is precisely where procedural ethics becomes crucial (Tapscott & Machón, 2025). Following the directive of Sikt, I attached the information letter and consent form to the invitation email so that potential participants could access more detailed information about the project. The attachment, required to be prepared using Sikt’s four-page template, was too lengthy and formal to serve as an appealing and respectful invitation on its own. Nevertheless, it is ethically significant.

5. Potential for Manipulation Once Elite Interviews Begin

Seduction is more likely to occur before elite interviews begin, whereas manipulation may arise during or after such interviews, particularly during data collection and data processing.

The power asymmetry is typically assumed to favour elite interviewees (Niu, 2024). University leaders could be defined as elites both socially and organizationally due to their substantial social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Conversely, novice researchers, including myself, generally occupy a lower position vis-à-vis elite interviewees, owing to their comparatively lower social status, less powerful organisational position, and dependence on interviewees’ permission to access personal data. However, elite status in society and organisations does not necessarily carry over into interview settings (Smith, 2006).

According to my experiences interviewing top-level university leaders, two types of power relations may emerge between elite interviewees and novice researchers once data collection begins: either a relatively equal relationship or an asymmetric one that favours the interviewers. The latter could render interviewees particularly vulnerable to manipulation if researchers act with ill intent. Contrary to the large power distance (Liu, 2018) and elites’ domination of interviews (Welch et al., 2002) reported in previous studies, I sometimes experienced a sense of equality and support from top-level university leaders during interviews. This could be interpreted as a form of collegial support across institutions. Several interviewees expressed interest in my project, asking me to share my dissertation once completed. Some reassured me that I could reach out again if needed. One even inquired about my career ambitions after the PhD. However, I sometimes observed my interviewees’ vulnerability. Once elites enter the research field as interviewees, their elite status could be destabilised or deconstructed. This does not mean that their social or organisational standing disappears, but rather that it carries less weight in a context where researchers exert greater control over knowledge production. Influence in the research field rests more on epistemic capital (Maton, 2003), such as expertise in relevant disciplines and topics. Researchers, for example, are empowered by their control over the research process: they formulate the interview questions and decide how the data will be transcribed, analysed and reported. In this setting, elite interviewees’ social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) may not reinforce their power. Instead, their reputation and visibility may expose them to heightened public scrutiny, making them more vulnerable to reputational harm if the data they provide are misused or manipulated.

Below, I use excerpts from the interview transcripts to illustrate the potential vulnerability of elite interviewees to manipulation:

There’s a lot of people here who are experts in criticising things… You can’t keep all these highly educated experts in-house and big egos in-house and not expect them to, you know, speak their mind. That would be wrong, right? (Interviewee A)

What works as a manager or leader in many other organizations do not work at the university because of these quarrelsome, not well-behaved academics. (Interviewee B)

And I notice perhaps most clearly from the [leadership position] that [he/she] is not used to necessarily getting so much resistance …But I see that [he/she] finds it more comfortable to approach the rector… preferably in a way to avoid having the dialogue with me that [he/she] finds unpleasant… (Interviewee C)

If researchers aimed at provoking public controversy or supporting claims about the erosion of academic freedom, they could choose to cite only interviewee A’s words before the ellipsis, so that interviewee A might be misunderstood as opposing or criticising academics’ freedom of speech - something considered unacceptable in Norwegian academia. Interviewee B apparently used language disrespectful towards academic staff. If researchers were to act with the same ill intent, they could place interviewee B in a predicament like that of Anne Borg simply by disclosing interviewee B’s identity. Anne Borg, the former rector of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, resigned after being accused of undermining academic freedom. Interviewee C described friction with another leader and revealed that leader’s position and gender, thereby rendering the individuals potentially traceable. If researchers intentionally resorted to sensationalism, they might seriously compromise research ethics by exposing both interviewee C and the other leader to reputational harm through inadequate anonymisation of key details such as name, gender and position.

Power relations (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023; Scheytt & Pflüger, 2024; Taquette & Borges da Matta Souza, 2022) inevitably involve “ethically important moments” (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004, p. 277). Such power relations are constructed in context-specific ways, contingent on the field and on the forms of capital valued within it. In this sense, eliteness and vulnerability may be two sides of the same coin. When epistemic capital carries greater weight in the research field, elite interviewees’ social status may become precarious and fail to protect them from ethical harm, such as manipulation.

6. Conclusion and Final Reflections

In this article, I have applied reflexivity to explore the ethical challenges in elite interviews, drawing on my experiences interviewing top-level leaders at Norwegian universities. This article offers new insights in three aspects: First, it acknowledges the gaps in procedural ethics, specifically the paradoxes in current ethical frameworks that may leave elite participants vulnerable to both seduction and manipulation. Second, it clarifies the distinction between attraction and seduction and discusses how novice researchers may ethically attract, rather than seduce, potential elite participants - an ethical challenge many researchers face before conducting elite interviews. Third, it analyses the mechanisms through which elite participants may be vulnerable to manipulation during and after elite interviews, where power relies more heavily on the epistemic capital held by researchers and the social and cultural capital of interviewees carries less weight, potentially exposing them to ethical harm.

Table 1 summarises the methodological contributions of this article and points to several directions for future research. To strengthen procedural ethics, researchers may investigate how governance bodies could better incorporate participants’ perspectives into ethical frameworks and whether improving participants’ ethical literacy may reduce their vulnerability to ethical harm. Regarding ethics in practice, researchers, especially those who have successfully recruited elites, should make their recruitment strategies transparent and justify whether they rely on attraction or seduction. The experience exchanges may contribute to a more nuanced understanding of these concepts in elite interviews. Further research could also examine how manipulation may occur before elite interviews and how seduction may arise during or after them. Finally, this article is limited by my perspective as a novice researcher, based on individually grounded and authentic research experiences. As an under-explored topic, there remains substantial scope for future research to examine whether key variables, such as researchers’ positionality (novice versus experienced) and different empirical settings (for example, countries other than Norway), may mediate findings on ethical challenges in elite interviews.

Table 1.

Illustration of Ethical Challenges in Elite Interviews

	Before elite interviews	During elite interviews	After elite interviews
Procedural ethics	Seduction & manipulation	Seduction & manipulation	Seduction & manipulation
Ethics in practice	Seduction	Manipulation	Manipulation

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the top-level university leaders in Norway for contributing data and the anonymous reviewers and editors for their constructive feedback.

ORCID iD

Jieyu Ruan

Ethical Considerations

This article reflects on the ethical challenges, drawing on the author’s experiences in a PhD project. The PhD project received ethical approval from Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research [Ref.408276] before data collection, and the interviewees consented to participation.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Open access funding provided by Nord University, Norway.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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