The task for this course work (Qualitative methods in anthropology) was to find a group of people (‘microculture’) who we were interested in and who we thought shared a common set of rules and knowledge and engaged in common practices. The task involved conducting at least five interviews with a key informant of this group. Part of this task was also to engage in a short session of participant observation at the end of the research. However, this session was rather marginal compared to the interviews. This meant that we were mostly researching our informant‘s explicit and verbalized knowledge. The aim of our work was to define folk terms, recurrent themes and learn about the principle that structure the group’s knowledge and practice. The approach was meant to be inductive.
Our instructor would give us theoretical input every week and provide a general framework for the research. However, due to the open and qualitative nature of the interviews it was up to us as students to define the course of the interviews and important topics . Also, the work was supposed to be conducted individually.
After stumbling upon an interesting magazine article on ambulant hospice workers, I decided to contact different volunteer centers in Hamburg to find an informant that would be interested in participating. During my first contact with volunteer centers I was informed that most of their ambulant ‚workforce‘ was made up by volunteers so I decided to carry out the research with one of them.
For the first interview, we were instructed to follow an open-end approach. I only asked very general question to trigger descriptive answers that kept my informant talking. I initiated the inquiry by explaining that I was interested in learning everything that I needed to know in order to behave accordingly to the rules, similar to what a new volunteer would learn upon starting their volunteer work. I was especially interested in typical routines of the ambulant hospice volunteer work. For the first two interviews my informant would outline the obligatory training process and the general process of attending a dying person. Throughout the interview sessions I could make out some recurrent themes that not only seemed to be of general interest to my informant but also central to the volunteer work in general. For the last three interviews we moved from a descriptive to a more semantic level. I asked more explicitly about the strategies and conflicts that resulted in attending a dying person and their family. I soon realized that my informant kept repeating the important balance between being close to the dying person and being distant to them.
At the end I was able to gather data from almost ten hours of interviews (five sessions) that I had taped and transcribed. I also worked with Atlas.TI to organize and structure my informant‘s knowledge and help me define relationships between the themes.
My work concluded that for hospice service volunteers intimacy and personal distance are not conflicting but rather complementary concepts. The most essential part of their volunteer work consists of striking a balance between being close to the dying person and maintaining a ‚healthy‘ distance to them and their families. This is reached by certain written rules and informal strategies like referring to people by their surnames or not giving out any personal information or details. Intimacy on the other hand is achieved by minor physical contact and paying close attention to the person‘s feelings and words. Personal intimacy and distance are also mutually dependant concepts since in their role as a stranger the volunteer can help the struggling person in an unbiased and open-minded way.