Volunteers’ digressive familiarity with local concerns was itself the object of study

Evidence

With the same extremely ¢ne-grained detail, she described the military workers’ unsafe work habits, while I grew more and more agitated, worrying that hearing about such microscopic details of the battleships’ activities was not part of my interview plan (after hearing eight volunteers follow the same pattern in interviews, however, I realized that I should not try so hard to keep them “on track” ^ that this pattern was itself a track). — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”, 71

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A meta-lesson in fieldwork: the researcher’s trained instinct to keep an informant ‘on track’ actively suppressed the very data sought. Could seed a story about an interviewer whose method collapses when they realize the rambling is the answer.
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 71