This paper describes the reflections of two social work PhD students based on their personal and professional experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic. The students describe their positionality and use that to expound on the impact of the pandemic on their lives. They reflect on the disruptions to their social work education and research priorities including transitioning to online learning and modifications to research agendas. They then discuss ongoing distractions such as worries about getting sick, mental health concerns, and financial constraints. They share their discoveries about glaring disparities in coronavirus infection and death rates, the need to adjust research agendas in response to current events, and the urgency for qualitative research strategies to add meaning to the numbers being reported. In addition, the authors describe shared experiences and intersections they discovered while writing this essay. Finally, recommendations for practice include recommitting to social work values to help surmount the ongoing waves of this pandemic; reimagining social work education so that disparities and injustice intersect with every subject taught and graduates become experts at leading social change; and harnessing the untapped potential of qualitative research to drive real, systemic change.
Significant conceptual and empirical evidence has been found through qualitative research about the benefits, limitations, and uses of individual interviews. However, there is scant research illustrating how researchers use specific techniques that center participants’ intersecting identities to build rapport, trust, and authentic connections during individual interviews, and especially during interviews with Black women. We illustrate how we used eight empirically grounded techniques in our qualitative individual interviews with Black women. Through our analysis of the interviews, the concept of safety emerged. “This person is safe” reflects the combined stories the women reported regarding their experiences engaging in individual interviews. In this article, we provide a brief background on individual interviewing in qualitative research, followed by the framing of our work. Thereafter, we provide context about the exemplar study, outline techniques shown to be effective in the literature, and provide examples from the exemplar study to show how each technique was used. Further research is needed to examine how researchers use various techniques in qualitative individual interviews in general, but with Black women more specifically.
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