“It was really good, she sort of took some words what happened, like what I would say”: Adapting dyadic interview techniques to capture the stories of marginalised voices in research

Abstract

Qualitative research continues to rely heavily on verbal language from solely the participant, which often omits the lived experiences of many people across a range of populations. This paper describes adaptations to an established research methodology, dyadic interviewing, which aims to open up possibilities of hearing unheard voices. Namely, we present an extension to the dyadic interview method as outlined by Caldwell (2014), in which the clinical systemic technique of Internalised Other interviewing is used to further focus in on the perspective of the participant. This method has been used by the authors in a research project with people with intellectual disabilities (Head et al., 2018), which gave people who may not have otherwise participated an opportunity to have their voices heard. A critical analysis of the use of the method is presented, with practical advice on its use. The authors argue that the methodology could be used with a number of populations in clinical and social research.