Return Interviews and Long Engagements with Ethnographic Informants

This paper uses examples from research conducted in preschools in Japan, China, and the United States to illustrate the features and virtues of return interviews with informants with whom ethnographers have long research engagements. Return interviews and long research engagements are powerful research strategies that help the ethnographers ask more insightful questions and make more sense of informants’ replies, informants better understand the researchers and their agenda, and the research to achieve a more diachronic perspective.