Ghostwriting Research: Positioning the Researcher in the Interview Text

This article reviews the practice of interview-based research through the metaphor of researcher as ghostwriter. What is suggested is that research can be examined as a form of textual practice in which researchers create images of others and also enter those images. In such a practice, research can be understood as a dialogic process where researchers are never neutral in their attempts to write about the lives of other people. This then leads to a need for researchers to account for their textual choices and their role in producing accounts of the experience of others. The article concludes that the ghostwriter metaphor is a way of understanding research that enables researchers to acknowledge their role in the production of textual representations of their research participants.