Interviewing respondents with a similar social status: Power, positionality, poetics

Most of the literature on power and positionality in qualitative, semi-structured interviews discusses research on either precarious, disenfranchised populations or influential elites. This paper focuses on interviewing social groups who have a similar societal status as academic researchers. By combining methodological literature on insider status and whiteness, the article interrogates how sameness unfolds in the research process. Based on two research projects with literary professionals and nightclub promoters respectively, the focus lies not on the fluid and context-dependent presence of symbolic power in the interview setting (for example, through discomfort), but rather reflects on casual research settings where power is experienced as absent (for example, through comfort). The paper proposes methodological strategies to attend to challenges brought about by sameness in advance, before the fieldwork starts: by utilising informality in gaining access (but doing so reflexively), by sampling outside of the somatic norm and by formulating specific forms of ‘how-questions’.