Why Is This So Hard?: An Autoethnography of Qualitative Interviewing

Researchers often struggle with power dynamics when conducting qualitative interviews. Interviewing can be emotionally exhausting, and sometimes it is difficult to tell where the interviewees' thoughts end and yours begin. This tension, though, is normal throughout the process, so I use autoethnography to share my experiences with conducting 75 interviews about neighborhood branding. I use my tales of feeling dumb, fatigue, data analysis, and narrative creation to open the so-called "black box" of interviewing processes in the field. The work contributes to broader knowledge by capturing the stresses of academic research of all stripes - and openly speaking about such in a public forum.