Settings for back-to-the-lander interviews were also carefully planned. I always gave advance disclosure of my researcher status to any host farmers with whom I volunteered, and suggested the possibility of an interview ahead of my arrival. In some cases interviews were conducted early in my stay at host farms, with follow-up interviews taking place later, after specific questions and topics had been generated through participant observation. In others I considered it more appropriate to work the length of my agreed stay, thus demonstrating a commitment to the hosts’ cause and establishing my credentials as a WWOOF volunteer before asking for their participation in a semi-structured interview.
Having demonstrated a commitment to shared goals through the voluntary labour negotiated between myself and the hosts, I structured some interview questions around shared experiences, such as particular farming techniques, while teasing out other information during the course of conversation. This provided a chance to probe more deeply into subjects not already covered during previous exchanges, such as attitudes toward life in rural Italy or biographical details. Such a strategy embraces Valentine’s (2005: 113) call to balance between formal researcher and trusted confidante roles. She suggests that prior assumptions about commonalities between interviewers and subjects may actually weaken the rigour of an interview, which ultimately relies on the researcher obtaining quality information not otherwise available. In my own experience, it has proven an effective technique to maintain the semi-structured format, even with interview subjects whom I may consider friends, and with whom I find it awkward to converse in such a structured manner. This was certainly the case with a couple I interviewed in November, 2009 whom I had known before initiating my formal fieldwork. Urban to rural migrants now living near Città della Pieve in Umbria, they responded to questions about alternative food networks, self-sufficiency and back-to-the-land ambitions in far greater detail than I would have expected based on our previous casual
discussions. This experience convinced me of the need to uphold some semblance of thematic structure in every interview, despite the natural deviations that occur in this format.
Questions concerning the farmers’ work and home environments prior to rural in-migration were always included, as were speculative discussions on their futures. These themes were not included to build over-arching generalisations about back-to-the-landers but to add some emotional and experiential flesh to the rather bare bones of this categorisation. As Valentine (2005: 111) claims, ‘...the aim of an interview is not to be representative (a common mistaken criticism of this technique) but to understand how individual people experience and make sense of their own lives.’ This consideration, among others, influenced my decision to interview as many members of a household as possible. Interviews were often arranged with whoever I happened to be working with most closely, though I always requested to involve other members of the family or household when appropriate. This approach averted any gender-based assumptions about authority and power within a household, and allowed for differing opinions to be aired. Seven of the 18 back-to-the-lander interviews were conducted with more than one person, meaning that at least 14 voices (other than my own) are captured within those 7 recordings. As Valentine (2005: 115) notes, ‘there is often widespread disparity between household members’ (both other adults’ and children’s) accounts of a range of topics.
Interviewing families together can provide more spontaneous, richer and validated accounts than those with individuals alone because different household members can corroborate each other’s stories or challenge inaccuracies in each other’s memories.’ Riley (2009; 2010) also makes a case for this approach specifically in regard to interviewing farmers. Disclosing transcripts and interview notes, he demonstrates how ‘unofficial’ interview participants make valuable contributions to ‘farm life histories’ by filling in memory gaps and contradicting or embellishing the accounts of the primary interview subjects. Citing Morris and Evans’ (2004) complaint that interviewing the ‘principal operator’ of the farm can result in a gender and age bias, Riley (2010: 653) argues that a more inclusive approach renders ‘visible’ the involvement of other actors, particularly women, children and farm employees. He challenges the
‘commonly received wisdom’ which holds that an interview should take place in a neutral environment where the risk of distraction is minimised: ‘Rather than “placeless” approaches that dematerialize and often depersonalize the research encounter, we should seek to celebrate, and employ, place.’ (Riley, 2010: 659)
For practical reasons as well as methodological ones, most of my interviews with back-to-the-landers were conducted in places that were full of distractions and far from neutral. I have mentioned integrating my interviews with WWOOF hosts into the natural routine of our shared time together. There were also several interviews with back-to-the-landers with whom I did not volunteer, but contacted through the WWOOF directory or mutual acquaintances. In almost all of these cases, interviews took place at their farms, where I was given a tour of the site and often some food or wine produced there. This approach had a simple practical dimension in that farmers can often struggle to leave their property when simultaneous tasks must be juggled, and interviewing them at home required the least sacrifice on their part. It was also consistent with my desire to remain attentive to place and to understand the less visible social and economic processes under discussion as having a corresponding spatial dimension, one best understood by conducting our interviews in that environment. The resulting recordings and transcripts are a traditionalist’s nightmare, with conversations frequently broken by animal bleating, family interruptions, telephone calls, meal arrivals, birdsong, children’s squeals, the rumble of passing traffic and sudden appearances of unexpected visitors. In addition to providing an evocative and naturalistic backdrop to sonically situate the research encounter, these ‘interruptions’ reveal aspects of the lived environment of a given farm.
This deeply situated approach is likely to be appropriate only to select research contexts;
there is certainly a strong case for a neutral interview environment when privacy concerns are paramount, or in which researchers must impart a sense of security and seclusion to interviewees. Furthermore, it must be recognised that the naturalism of my chosen settings did leave me wanting for greater clarity and an easier conversational flow. A participant’s commitment to the interview could be somewhat compromised when other distractions were present, and there are a frustrating number of muffled or drowned out segments of conversation that would have been clearer in another setting. Reflecting on the cumulative content of the transcripts, however, I feel that this has been a price worth paying.
Perhaps this compromise is best illustrated by an interview conducted with a back-to-the-lander in Emilia-Romagna, taking place just after lunch, a time on which we had settled that
morning. Expecting a certain degree of solitude and concentration, I was disappointed when the farmer asked if we could continue some work while we spoke. She needed to prepare dozens of bags of dried herbs for sale at the following day’s market, a process that included weighing, labeling and closing the bags with a hand-tied ribbon. Initially I was apprehensive about this, worrying that the diversion of attention would result in less considered answers to my questions and the noise of the cellophane packaging could clutter our recorded speech. I quickly realised, however, that the job itself – manual, repetitive, slow – facilitated a kind of contemplation that might not have been achievable in a more pressured atmosphere. Eye contact was minimal as we focused on the job, and there were some long pauses between responses. Rather than being problematic, this allowed space for contemplation and elaboration, the result being a rich, highly informative two-hour interview. I can only speculate about other outcomes, but my feeling is that had we done the interview in a more conventional fashion it would have been a quicker, less thorough conversation. This assumption rests on the fact that the interviewee was one of the WWOOF hosts who initially appeared least interested in my research project. Some hosts were very engaged with the subject throughout my stay, asking regular questions about the research and keen to offer as much assistance as they could. Others, particularly veteran WWOOF hosts who had seen literally hundreds of volunteers pass through their farm over several years, were in no way hostile but remained relatively indifferent to my dual position as researcher and WWOOFer. The fact that this interview was conducted while working - instead of requiring a donation of her time away from work - was key to eliciting the kind of open and thoughtful discourse I had hoped for. The persistent crinkling of cellophane throughout the recording, however, made for a tortuous transcription effort.