Critical Reflections on ‘Go-Along’ Interviews with Marginalized Young People Living in Rural Areas: How My Drive-Along Interview Turned into a Driving Lesson

In this paper, I want to share my personal story about how a naturalistic go-along interview with a young women turned into a private driving lesson for me, as I struggled to reverse my newly-bought (not so fancy) family car in a parking-basement (called the basement). The basement located next to a small shopping mall in a larger town situated in a rural municipality served a central leisure “space of their own” (White 1990) for young (predominantly male) car-racing (sub)culture (Lumsden 2013). The young people would meet, after hours to showcase their tuned and modified cars, hang out and play music. It was a contested space, as the young people fought for control and access to ‘their’ basement against the local citizens, authorities and the policy. In this chapter I want to critically reflect on how the go-along interview turned into a driving lesson (for me), and how that shifted the power balance during and after the interview, including reflection on what it meant when I was re-interviewing the same young women two years later. In the discussion, I want to extend this anecdote to critical reflections on the 20 go-along interviews that were conducted by my research team and my self during our longitudinal studies of marginalized young people living in rural areas in Denmark (Østergaard et al 2024). What ethical dilemmas were brought on, how did insights from the go-along interviews contribute to a deeper and thicker understanding of the young people’s everyday lives and how does it contribute to retention in qualitative longitudinal studies.