ABSTRACT
When an interviewer returns to a family after an absence of four years, inevitably her thoughts are focused on potential change. We have always tried to keep the same interviewer for any individual family over the years, and usually this has been possible: so the interviewer will have personal knowledge of the family of four years ago, and this will have been refreshed immediately before her visit by re-reading the transcript from the previous visit. Self-briefing of this kind is essential in order to know what individually-tailored follow-up questions need to be asked, but also to maintain the relationship at its peak. The interviewer will set off to see the family, then, with a genuine sense of anticipation and interest to discover what has happened since her last visit, how the child has developed, whether and how problems of last time have been resolved and what new issues now preoccupy the family. Implicit in a person’s interest in change must be their assumption of some kind of continuous relationship between themselves and their respondent; and the fact that interviewer and respondent seem effortlessly to take up the dialogue where they left off four years previously is a phenomenon which initially astonished us (though we had consciously worked to make it possible), and which we now regard as a major strength of this kind of interviewing method. 1
