in “ethnographical” design research – let me just pick the term – although i was trained in cultural studies… so, in qualitative design research you very often have a situation similar to the “group interview” because you work with collages, photography and other techniques on a mainly visual level. you try to figure out the language and logic of a certain culture or subculture.
as you are trying to detect both logic AND language it is vital for the communicating the results to your client that key players are at least partly involved in the research process as such.
the great and rewarding thing about this: if it works out it is like opening peoples eyes. it is like making people see and at the same time you yourself are also discovering something for the first time.

that is a truly wonderful process – and thank you very much, grant, for describing it here.
it is a journey to the unknown… and nothing gives it certainty but your belief in finding the key… and you know you will always find the meaning… because culture never comes without

People really do catch on when you let them in on it, don’t they? I think it’s because this kind of research is founded in the everyday modes of understanding one another that enable us to be-in-the-world-with-other-people. After all, if we didn’t know (without thinking) what people meant when they did things we’d never be able to navigate a city block. Bringing that pre-reflective knowledge of others up to more articulable (sorry) levels is the stuff of teaching and learning, but it’s got a pretty good head start in our natural everyday lives.

I have experienced the good team interview you describe many times. Not being anthropologists, but just plain old market researchers, we always tried to do depth-interviews in pairs, for precisely the spell-ing reason you mention. While one is writing, the other can be listening and watching the respondent.

I’ve also experienced the bad team interview. A friend used to describe it thus: “There are you are, quietly doing the interview with a fellow colleague, when right beside you, you hear a gun fired. You look at your colleague, and see that it was he who fired the gun — not at the respondent, but at you.”

In the worst case, my co-interviewer colleague persisted in answering our questions himself, usually in contradiction to the answers the respondent gave, and did so very forcefully. He resisted my attempts to silence him. Eventually, the respndent, who had started off quite friendly to us, was responding with, “Whatever you say. You seem to know better than me!”

You are right about empathy.