When conducting interviews about sensitive subject matter such as family life, powerful emotions may arise. The kinds of unexpected distress that can surface in interviews concerning topics laden with personal significance are different to the readily anticipated trauma that accompanies interviews in post-crisis or post-conflict situation. This article analyses the ethical considerations that accompany such research, drawing upon literature from oral history and qualitative sociology. The article traces ethical issues during the temporal phases of qualitative research – before, during and after an interview – before proposing three strategies that interviewers can adopt to help protect narrators from ongoing harm or distress after an interview. Such ethical safeguards include the self-interview, the post-interview follow-up with the narrator, and adopting an ethics of reciprocity that allows the narrator to feel that they are contributing to a larger purpose through involvement in research.

当进行有关家庭生活等敏感主题的访谈时，可能会产生强烈的情绪。在面谈具有个人意义的话题时，面试中可能会出现的意外困扰与危机后或冲突后情况下面试中容易引起的创伤是不同的。本文根据口述历史和定性社会学的文献，分析了伴随此类研究的伦理考虑。本文在定性研究的时间阶段（访谈之前，期间和之后）追溯了道德问题，然后提出了访谈者可以采用的三种策略，以帮助保护叙述者免受访谈后持续的伤害或困扰。此类道德保障措施包括自我访谈，采访讲述人的访谈后跟进，