Powerful yet Precarious: Rethinking Elite Interviewing Through Vulnerability, Absence and Disclosure

Elite interviewing is often framed as a method for accessing those in power. This paper adopts an alternative view and repositions it as a forum where power and vulnerability are relationally co-produced, negotiated, and revealed by both interviewer and interviewees. Drawing on 110 interviews across three prison health research projects, this study offers a self-reflexive and empirically grounded exploration of the nuanced dynamics that shape elite interviews. This paper significantly departs from dominant assumptions that portray elites as authoritative, detached or evasive. Instead, it examines how interviewers can inspire elites to feel vulnerable to scrutiny or exposure. They do so using soft coercion in snowball sampling, the intimacy of online interviewing, the emotional labour of disclosure, and the reputational risks involved in sharing sensitive insights. The paper also highlights how the shrinking pool of senior actors, accelerated from burnout, institutional restructuring, and post-COVID-19 pandemic attrition, signals a loss of institutional memory, which is an under-recognised form of elite power. Methodologically, the study proposes the idea that elite interviews should now be viewed as emotionally textured, ethically complex, and relationally co-produced encounters. Theoretically, it redefines elite status as contingent, precarious, and contextually situated rather than fixed and unidirectional. This work’s significance extends beyond academia, offering insights into transparency, accountability, and policy learning that can inform improvements in a system that is often replete with secrecy and centralised control. By reframing elite interviewing as an interactional process shaped by both authority and exposure, this research contributes original conceptual insight, rigorous empirical analysis and practical relevance. It urges scholars to attend to the affective, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of elite research, and to treat elite interviewees’ silence, vulnerability, and absence from participation not as gaps in data, but as critical data in themselves.