This article deals with narratives of traumatic experiences of parental violence in childhood, told by adult narrators in the context of clinical adult attachment interviews. The study rests on a corpus of interviews with 20 patients suffering from fibromyalgia, who were interviewed in the context of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Nine of the…

Despite the recent growth of interest in the interactional construction of research interviews and advances made in our understanding of the nature of such encounters, relatively little attention has been paid to the implications of this for interviewer training, with the result that advice on interviewing techniques tends to be very general.…

This article adopts a social constructionist approach in maintaining that indeterminacy of meaning is an unavoidable aspect of interview research. It uses positioning analysis to examine how subject positions and contingently constructed meanings are produced in interview interactions. The analysis focuses on excerpts from a series of three…

This article examines how Spanish-speaking Latina (im)migrants position themselves relative to US language policies. Drawing from interviews with 15 Latin American women in the USA, we illustrate how understandings of language policy are constructed through individuals' reports of everyday experiences and framed within the constraints of…

The relationship between language and identity has been explored in a number of ways in applied linguistics, and this article focuses on a particular aspect of it: self-representation in the oral history interview. People from a wide range of backgrounds, currently resident in one large city in England, were asked to reflect on their lives as part…

At first glance, communicating a suspect's rights in police interviews appears to be a straightforward task. However, it is more complex than it appears. In particular, for suspects who come from different cultural backgrounds or legal systems and who rely on interpreters in police interviews, ensuring a thorough understanding of their rights and…