Visualisation of identity in context of e-interview

New information and communications technologies open large new opportunities for qualitative research, in particular for interviewing. This paper is based on the authors' experience of biographical deep interviewing with idea of visualization of life course. In an interviews face to face, we often use a tentative schedule of life line or a family tree to stimulate the narration. If the respondent painted on paper the line with positive and negative life events, it is easier to proceed the narration of controversial subjects.

 Some novelty in the net-technology on Russian recruitment market open the perspective of other visual incentive for communication between interviewer and interviewee (the computer-based visualization of resume).  In order to optimize business objectives, program developers created the form for import profile data to visualize educational and professional experience with some skills, hobbies and values. For the sociologist, it is important to distinguish the structure of life event on the level of biography and the narrative story about the life, especially for the phase of narrative interrogation in interview.

When we compared with the face-to-face interview, the e-interview entails two types of displacement, time and space. In relation to time, the interactions between interviewer and interviewee are likely to be asynchronous; while in terms of space, the relationship takes place "at a distance" through the screen-based text. Despite of a limited register for communication and partially presented identity, e-interview with pre-visualised data creates interesting and productive scenario for start of communication of both researcher and subject because of legitime form of representing personal data in Internet. Of course it is dependent on willing and competent access to net-technology on the part of researcher and subject, but this way of research conducting can be successful in access to certain types of sampling.