Interviewing family caregivers: implications of the caregiving context for the research interview

Family caregiving tends to involve strong and often competing emotional experiences. Most of our knowledge of caregiving stems from interview research, much of it cross-sectional in nature. In this article we explore the implications of interviews as a research method for understanding caregiving. Specifically, we address difficulties in interpreting participants' talk about caregiving when this talk is simultaneously an articulation of experience and an attempt to cope with that experience. Either uncritically accepting accounts as reflective of experience, without considering the role of coping, or making assumptions about the success of caregiver coping in this context, might be erroneous. Our own experiences of interviewing family caregivers in different research projects will be drawn upon as examples. We conclude by questioning the ability to draw conclusions about caregiving and/or caregiver coping based solely on interview research, and call for greater integration of observational and longitudinal methods in family caregiving research.