Seeing Things Differently
Two doctoral researchers, Larysa Sugay and Wiktoria Moritz-Leśniak, reflect on how returning to fieldwork materials can reveal things they did not recognize during their original encounters.
Listening to My Own Interviews
Larysa Sugay
In our project, I have primarily interviewed Ukrainian children attending Polish schools, seeking to understand their educational experiences after arriving in Poland. I wanted to know how they experienced entering a new school community, learning a new language of instruction, and navigating unfamiliar expectations and social relationships. I occasionally interviewed parents, teachers, and intercultural assistants to better understand the circumstances surrounding the children's experiences, but the children themselves remained at the center of my research.
When I began interviewing, I worried about asking the wrong questions or overlooking something important. Gradually, I learned to pay attention to moments when something a child said sparked my curiosity. Sometimes these moments were accompanied by a quiet “Hmm…” or “Oh!” or a change in facial expression. They often signaled that something unexpected had emerged and that I should explore it further.
An especially important experience came when several children became involved in our research as co-researchers. One girl went further than the others, conducting interviews with schoolmates and other children, including some she did not know personally. She prepared for the interviews, arranged meetings, and recorded the conversations, following the research procedures we had established.
When I listened to her recordings, I was struck by how naturally the conversations unfolded. The children moved between topics, offered detailed accounts of their experiences, and responded to questions that were often remarkably direct. Adults sometimes surround questions with explanations and qualifications, but my young co-researcher tended to ask precisely what she wanted to know.
At first, I assumed that the difference lay mainly in the relationship between interviewer and interviewee. Children undoubtedly speak differently with another child than with an adult researcher. But when I returned to my own recordings, I realized that something else was happening.
I had been listening to my interviews differently from the way I listened to hers.
When analyzing my own conversations, I concentrated on what the children said: their answers, their explanations, and the experiences they described. I paid much less attention to my own questions, how I phrased them, or why I asked them at particular moments.
When listening to interviews conducted by my young co-researcher, however, I paid attention to both sides of the conversation. I examined not only the children's responses but also the questions that elicited them.
I realized that I had been analyzing only part of my own interviews.
This discovery prompted me to return to my recordings and listen to them as though someone else had conducted the interviews. I began asking myself why I had pursued one topic rather than another, why I had phrased a question in a particular way, and how my participation had shaped the conversation.
The experience reminded me that an interview is not simply a collection of answers. It is an interaction in which both participants contribute to the knowledge being produced. Returning to my recordings helped me recognize aspects of my own interviewing practices that I had previously overlooked.
What I Notice Now
Wiktoria Moritz-Leśniak
When I reflect on my fieldwork and the material I collected, I am struck by how much ethnographic research depends on living relationships. I developed relationships with my interlocutors, and they shared stories about the relationships in their own lives. Leaving the field does not undo these connections, but it changes my position in relation to them, allowing me to notice things I might not have seen before.
Recently, I have become aware of two influences that are changing how I approach my field materials.
The first is a change in my own life. Becoming a mother has drawn my attention to aspects of everyday life that I had previously considered less carefully: the additional care involved in parenting, doctors' appointments, urban architecture and accessibility, activities for children, support networks, and the ways parents obtain information.
Although I knew about these issues from the literature, experiencing some of them myself has changed how I perceive them. They may not be directly related to education, but they form part of the broader circumstances in which parenting takes place and can strengthen or undermine parents' resilience and agency.
Returning to my fieldnotes and interviews, I find myself wondering what occupies the everyday lives of the parents I interviewed: what is present but remains unnamed, what they did not share, and what I did not think to ask.
Would I ask different questions today? Would I seek out parents in places I had not previously considered?
I now find myself spending more time in playgrounds, noticing parents collecting their children from school, and listening to the languages children speak on football pitches. These ordinary scenes have become newly meaningful to me. They make me think not only about how I interpret the material I already have, but also about the encounters and relationships through which ethnographic knowledge emerges.
Sometimes these observations lead me to new questions. At other times, they leave me frustrated by gaps in the material that I can no longer fill.
The second influence comes from encounters with other researchers. Recently, I attended a conference of the Committee on Migration Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Gdańsk, where presentations addressed integration strategies, emotions in fieldwork, and researchers' experiences. Such exchanges encourage me to reconsider aspects of my own material. Details I once regarded as insignificant may turn out to matter, while things I assumed were ordinary may be quite distinctive.
Yet I want to remain cautious about how I incorporate these changing perspectives into my analysis. As someone still learning anthropology and ethnography, I recognize that new experiences, emotions, and knowledge can enrich my understanding. But I do not want them to overwrite the perspectives of my interlocutors or lead me to impose meanings that the material cannot support.
The challenge is to remain open to new interpretations without losing sight of where the material came from, whose experiences it represents, and what it can and cannot allow me to claim.
Returning to the Material, Returning to Ourselves
Larysa and Wiktoria describe different experiences, but both remind us that ethnographic analysis involves more than revisiting what participants said. It also requires examining how we listened, what we noticed, and what we brought to our encounters.
For Larysa, listening to a child co-researcher's interviews revealed aspects of her own interviewing practices that she had overlooked. For Wiktoria, motherhood and exchanges with other scholars brought new questions to material she thought she knew.
Neither suggests that returning to the material necessarily produces more complete or definitive interpretations. Instead, their reflections show how ethnographic understanding develops over time, as researchers reconsider earlier encounters in light of subsequent experiences.
Perhaps one of the most important things we learn after leaving the field is how much our own ways of seeing have changed.
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