Memories of Youth and Interviewing Young People: Reflections on Young People’s Understandings of Drug Use

This paper draws on a qualitative study of young people in Milton Keynes and
their understanding of drugs and drug use. It focuses, partly, on the
relationship Rob Pattman established with Susie, a young woman he was
interviewing about her views on life in general and drugs in particular. We are
interested in the kinds of identities that young people were establishing in
relation to each other. Our view is that interviewers do not elicit descriptive
accounts from interviewees. Rather, the interviewees construct their identities
through what they say about themselves and others, and this depends, crucially,
on how they position and are positioned by the interviewer (Hollway and
Jefferson, 2000; Frosh et al., 2002; Walkerdine et al., 2001). As the above
authors have argued, the sorts of feelings interviewees evoke in interviewers
must be acknowledged and addressed since these provide important insights
into the dynamics of the interviewer- interviewee relationship.