At the end of this post I have attached a brief excerpt from my interview with my mother. As for some context: in my current research on conservatives, I have found that many women have made “mother” into a political category, with motherhood no longer simply relating to values like fairness, justice, or truth, but becoming a value itself. While this argument is tentative, I wanted to talk with my mother to see how she conceptualized her role as a mother, and so the bulk of this interview up to this point had been about her political values and her status as a mother, with the selected excerpt demonstrating the turn towards synthesizing those two ideas.

I conducted the interview over the phone, partially because my mother, like a number of people in my target demographic, aren’t very familiar with video calls, so I conduct a lot of audio-only interviews. This medium proved to have some difficulties: not only do I lose a lot of information about her appearance and facial expressions, but we also had connectivity issues that resulted in the phone call dropping. There were also some advantages: I found myself much more attentive to the logic of her sentences as they turned into arguments. I also was able to freely use my laptop to take notes, as well as refer to/update a working interview guide.

Sharing with Ogo, I found myself self-conscious about a few things that I hadn’t considered before, such as how long my mother would take to answer questions: In one page of transcript, I usually asked one question. However, while I saw this as a place to improve, I also recognize it as a recurrent style of my interviews: I tend to get rambling informants and mostly sit back and listen. For this reason, Ogo noted how I ask longer, more specific questions, with the hope of getting them to think along certain lines. I was concerned that in contextualizing my questions, revealing my research goals, or constructing hypothetical scenarios, I would pigeonhole my informant with leading questions, but Ogo saw this as providing fodder for their answers and creating more specific open-ended questions. I was working on a semi-structured guide, and so I worried about questions awkwardly leading into one another, but based on Ogo’s response, I managed to blend them into the conversation.

Both of us interviewed parents, which may not be the best case study for building rapport, but I did feel more confident asking direct, theoretical questions—not because my mom is knowledgeable about my research, but because I didn’t feel the need to hide my thinking, which I often feel with my informants. Thus, a question like “Do you see your role as a mother as something that’s innately political?” made sense for me to ask my mom but probably wouldn’t be the best for a new informant, which I think speaks to an aspirational rapport: we want to be as comfortable asking questions to long-time informants as we would be asking our parents.

Interview:

Interviewer: What I’m curious about here, and to reveal my hand a little bit, a lot of the women I’ve talked to or follow on Twitter or follow on their various social media platforms designed for conspiracy theories, cite “mother” as a defining political identity for them. Do you see your role as a mother as something that’s innately political?

Subject: I don’t. I think I would be advocating for children to have access to education, even higher education, access to being able to afford a higher education, access to healthcare, access to nutritious food, access to good information. I would like to keep them safe. I would encourage gun control. I’ve always felt that every child, regardless of whether they’re mine or not, every person who’s put on this earth should have the same protections and the same ability to learn about just things in life that are going to provide them with safety, health, and just good basic knowledge to be able to live…Life is very, very difficult. So without running into so many obstacles that I think everyone should have, that it doesn’t matter whether it’s my child or not, or whether I have five children, 10 children, one child, that my child should not have any more or less than children.

[skipping ahead because she talks on this point for a while…]

I: I want to paint a picture for you here, just to push on this idea a little more, this idea of motherhood as political, let’s transport you back to your favorite time period—the Reagan era—and imagine you’re getting an ad from a congressional candidate, a Republican candidate who says, “Drugs are flooding the streets. They’re damaging our children’s brains. You, as a mother, need to vote for Doug Newton because he will protect our kids.” How do you feel about receiving that ad?

S: I don’t know. Should I feel…whoever: give me your ideas though. I need to see what’s behind your cliche or what’s behind your ad. I want to plan, I want to know stats, I want to know what your actions would be, not just some sort of campaign rhetoric. So I want to see behind the curtain.

I: But how about here’s another one, 400,000 American children go missing every year and the liberal government does nothing about elect Doug Newton and he will save those 400,000 American children.

S: I don’t believe it.