Separate But Simultaneous Interviewing of Husbands and Wives: Making Sense of Their Stories

This article argues that separate interviews with spouses can provide valuable insights on marital decision making. The notion that one partner can speak for both needs to be abandoned. However, in the process of including unrepresented family voices, making sense of multiple accounts becomes problematic. Multiple accounts of marriage are told when a researcher interviews husbands and wives on the process of decision making. Some differences in spouses' accounts arise from their division of labor, where one spouse knows more than the other. Other differences in accounts result from a division of labor in storytelling where the partners support each other in joint and individual perfor mances of telling. However, some differences in accounts render the researcher's analytic tasks far more complex when two stories, not one, are told. Finally, the account that ultimately becomes the written version needs to be better understood as a shifting construct of separate interviews with both spouses and how the researcher both interacts with respondents during the interview and analyzes the interview text.