This chapter centres on discussion of some of the ethical, feminist, emotional and methodological issues associated with how rapport is gained, maintained, and ‘used’ in qualitative interviews. Our interest in rapport was stimulated by our own research,1 where we found that in order to persuade some of our women interviewees2 to talk freely, we needed consciously to exercise our interviewing sk...

What characterizes the language of people who have known one another for a long time? In the US one thinks of groups of friends, leaning in towards one another, smiling broadly, and finishing one another’s sentences in their eagerness to contribute to the conversation. The details may differ from culture to culture, but the fact of differences between groups of friends and groups of strangers s...