In this piece I hope to share some of my thoughts of conducting my first ever dyad interview. The interviews I collected for my PhD fieldwork involved doing one-to-one interviews, so doing a dyad interview was a new challenge and experience for me. In addition to the interview itself I had to keep in mind to live-translate as the mother being interviewed didn’t speak English.
I interviewed a mother and daughter regarding their experiences of transnational relationships between the UK, particularly between Tower Hamlets and Bangladesh, and vice versa. I had prepared myself for the live-translation part though one can never fully prepare for such occasions. I made sure I found out how to say some words in Bengali, as I have a habit of switching to Benglish when I don’t know a word in Bengali but for the purposes of this interview I wanted to ensure I was able to convey the questions as accurately as possible. I was incredibly nervous, as I was very conscious of my insider status (I will discuss this topic in another post) and remembering to live-translate.
The interview commenced and much of it went smoothly. I, in hindsight, didn’t translate some of the long responses given by the mother, as I became preoccupied with making sure I was capturing the responses and actually listening so that we were effortlessly moving onto the next question.
Thankfully there were moments when the daughter stepped in and translated bits but now looking back I could sense that I was too conscious of my positionality.
I have reminded myself to not be so hard on myself and through constructive criticism on my first dyad interview I have also learnt to enjoy the interviews as well as accepting that there is nothing wrong with going off script here and there.