When the Interview Becomes “Almost Therapy”: Researcher’s Role Boundaries in Conversations about War and Forced Displacement

The article examines professional and ethical risks arising in in-depth interviews with individuals who have experienced war and forced displacement. Drawing on interviews with refugees from Ukraine (2014 and 2022 waves), it analyzes situations where the researcher is perceived by informants not only as a “data collector” but also as a figure of potential support — a listener, “psychologist”, mediator capable of alleviating tension and endowing traumatic experience with meaning. The article demonstrates how “therapeutic expectation” is produced during interviews: through requests for advice and evaluations, boundary testing, and attempts to shift the conversation from testimony mode to emotional support mode. These interactional moments create risks of re-traumatization for participants, as well as risks of blurring the researcher's role and secondary traumatization of the researcher themselves. The article proposes a typology of situations where interviews begin shifting toward “quasi-therapeutic” interaction and describes boundary-maintenance practices: frame agreement, right to pause and discontinue topics, neutral forms of empathic response, post-interview debriefing procedures, and reflexive documentation. It concludes that acknowledging the researcher’s emotional involvement can be transformed into a methodological resource without substituting professional roles.