La estructura tridimensional de Xrcc4 completa revela una región car boxilo-terminal globular

There are many different ways of conducting interviews. I have chosen to undertake interviews from a life-history inspired approach, meaning that I have tried to learn as much about my research partners’ lives as possible while at the same time talking about health. I have

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followed my partners for over a year and met with them numerous times. I have talked to them about their lives, their families, how they grew up in villages as well as in Fairbanks, their children, their jobs, their hopes and their plans for the future.

Two aspects of interviewing have been particularly determinant for how interviews have unfolded: settings and format. The settings of an interview have often defined whether it is an informal interview or a formal interview. Meeting a partner in a bar for an initial talk about health and how this study is constructed represents an informal interview that can lead to a long conversation. Coming to a partner’s home with an audio recorder does not always invite informal conversation. Instead such situations have turned out to be excellent for formal interviews, where a list of questions are asked and answered, and follow-up questions and additional topics are explored as allowed. Visiting women in their homes has also given me the opportunity to see how they live: to see health in connection to their homes, their families and their surroundings. It has also given them a chance to have an active role in establishing the interview settings – an ability they would not have had in an unfamiliar, office setting. Some interviews were conducted in conference rooms, removing research partners from their personal, familiar surroundings. Those interviews contained far fewer disturbances such as children interrupting or dogs barking. It allowed research partners to focus fully on the questions I asked and the answers they gave. There are benefits and detriments to both interview settings, and the fact that I have employed both have given me access to a variety of information and impressions of my Yup’ik research partners.

My approach to interviewing has been particularly influenced by James Spradley’s The Ethnographic Interview (1979) and Steiner Kvale’s Interviews: an Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing (1996). Spradley asks that the interviewer try to know what the

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interviewee knows, the way that the interviewee knows it (Spradley 1979:24). Heyl describes well how Kvale reminds us that the Latin etymology of the word “conversation” is “wandering together with” (Heyl 2001:371, Kvale 1996:4). Kvale himself describes how the interview is a way to obtain “qualitative descriptions of the life world of the subject with respect to interpretation of their meaning” (Kvale 1996:124). The ethnographic interview is usually conducted over a longer time period, with multiple individual sessions and informal conversations. This allows for mutually respectful and on-going relationships. The ethnographic interview is constructed through a relationship between the understanding of how interviewees reconstruct social experiences through speech and how interviewers make sense of what they are saying (Heyl 2001:370). It is a co-construction of knowledge.

I have been fortunate enough to develop several on-going relationships with my research partners. I have been able to go back and interview them several times; obtaining a relationship with them in which we have been able to explore the meanings they place in different notions and situations connected to health. I have also had shorter, more superficial relationships with research partners who donated their time as best they could and gave me the opportunity to contrast the knowledge stemming from on-going conversations as opposed to one-time interviews. Both relationships are valuable. Through them I have been able to confirm or dismiss patterns and similarities in opinions among them as I based one-time interviews on questions and ideas from on-going conversations that I later went back and challenged with the new information I received from one-time interviews.

Formal interviews were semi-structured, meaning that a list of questions was prepared but not all questions were necessarily asked and there was no specific order in which they were asked. Some research partners required more structured interviews while others completely

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disregarded my line of questioning, choosing to tell their stories in their own ways. In such interviews I completely abandoned my questions. I designed questions to be open-ended in order to let research partners talk as freely as possible, without leading them in certain directions, and to let research partners associate questions with social experience in their own way. Before conducting any formal interviews I made sure to meet the women I intended to interview. I bought them a cup of coffee, a beer, or just met up with them and talked to them about the interview and what I was going to ask them. In this way I was not a complete stranger when we sat down for more formal interviews and they were familiar with the topics of the interview.

I have considered how to organize interview questions. The order in which I asked the questions determined what kind of associations I gave research partners. For example asking: “what does it mean to be healthy” before asking: “who taught you about health” was intended to foster a more abstract answer to the first question. On the other hand if I ask: “who taught you about health” first, the partner will have a frame of reference that she might not think in terms of if asked the other way around. I experienced both. One important strategy has been to sometimes let silences stand. To not fill every pause with a new question or comment but instead remember to give time and listen, even when nothing is being said out loud.

2.4 Participant observation