How to Overcome the Secretiveness of a Group: Opportunities of Online Interviews

In a pandemic, qualitative methodologies and in-person interviews, the key to understanding the experiences lived by participants in social phenomena, proved to be ill-suited. As a result of the restrictions imposed during this period, the challenge was even more considerable in the research of groups and practices marked by secretiveness and self-closing, in that our presence in the field, always marked by hurdles, was impracticable. In this text, we propose a reflection on the experience of conducting online interviews with university students (Porto, Portugal) involved in praxe (hazing), a complex and multidimensional social phenomenon that profoundly shapes academic life in Portuguese universities. We will discuss the differences between holding in-person interviews before the pandemic and online interviews during the lockdown. We draw attention to practical, methodological, and ethical considerations in adapting research to an online context and conclude that, despite the challenges, online interviews opened up surprising opportunities for collecting these students’ experiences.