Seducing or Manipulating the Participants? A Novice Researcher’s Reflexive Exploration of Ethical Challenges in Elite Interviews

Researchers rarely reflect on ethical challenges in elite interviews, particularly those related to potential harm towards elite interviewees. This article employs reflexivity, drawing on the concepts of procedural ethics and ethics in practice, to explore such challenges, written in response to a professor’s comment that the author’s intention to attract potential participants appears to be seduction or manipulation. Based on the author’s experiences as a PhD student interviewing top-level university leaders in Norway, the article discusses ethical challenges in elite interviews from three aspects. First, it recognises the gaps in procedural ethics, namely the paradoxes in current ethical frameworks that may leave elite participants vulnerable to both seduction and manipulation. Second, it clarifies the distinction between attraction and seduction and discusses how novice researchers may ethically attract, rather than seduce, potential elite participants - an ethical challenge many researchers face before conducting elite interviews. Third, it analyses how elite participants may be vulnerable to manipulation during and after interviews, where epistemic capital held by researchers outweighs the social and cultural capital of interviewees in the research field. The article concludes by summarising the key methodological contributions and outlining several directions for future research on this under-explored topic.