7 ‘ Doing rapport ’ and the ethics of ‘ faking friendship ’ JEAN DUNCOMBE AND JULIE JESSOP

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 skills in ‘doing rapport’ with – or rather to – them. Uncomfortably, we came to realize that even feminist interviewing could sometimes be viewed as a kind of job where, at the heart of our outwardly friendly interviews, lay the instrumental purpose of persuading interviewees to provide us with data for our research, and also (hopefully) for our future careers. Our discomfort in our research interviews has broader analogies and deeper roots. For example, there are strong parallels between ‘doing rapport’ and the kinds of ‘emotion work’ that women, in particular, perform in their relationships by simulating empathy to make others feel good (Hochschild, 1983). Hochschild has argued that the spread of jobs where women are paid to simulate empathy represents the ‘commercialization’ of human feeling, and those who do such work run the risk of feeling, and indeed actually becoming, ‘phoney’ and ‘inauthentic’ (Hochschild, 1983). Seen in this light, feelings of ‘insincerity’ that we sometimes experience as interviewers can be linked to the pressures of commercialization in the ‘job’ of qualitative interviewing; even within feminist research (see also Bott, 2010). An obvious starting point for a discussion of ethical issues associated with rapport is the early seminal article by Ann Oakley, which has played a large part in opening up feminist discussion of this ‘commonly used but ill-defined term’ (Oakley, 1981: 35). Oakley criticized the model of ‘rapport’ advocated in methods textbooks for being instrumental, hierarchical and non-reciprocal, qualities she characterized as would-be ‘professional’ and ‘scientific’, and basically masculine. By aiming to suppress the role of gender and individual personality in interview relationships, this model failed to