As a career researcher, and sometimes moderator, I’ve often heard the refrain at the end of a 1×1 interview: “That was so therapeutic! Thanks for listening!”

It’s part of the job, active listening. Qualitative researchers do it really well, but sometimes this leaves the respondent wanting more. Or, if you’re interviewing “stakeholders,” you’re hearing about the dysfunctions of the project or the people, instead of (or as part of) the topic at hand. This airing of concerns, grievances and unspoken fears puts the interviewee at ease, now that they’ve not only expressed themselves but they’ve been heard. They’re on the record, so to speak.

Of course it’s all related. The dysfunction to the function, to how we feel about things. If we talk it out, if we bury it, how we cope, how we deal. On product development teams, “Business” refers to this as The Culture of the organization. How the work gets done, yes, that is the process. But how we feel about it, how we treat each other, how quickly we recover from failure or how aggressively we go after goal…That’s Culture. It’s hard to “fix” yet easy to diagnose.

In my twenty plus years as a qualitative researcher, in all sorts of settings, I’ve come to the conclusion that sometimes, yes, it IS part of my job to act like a therapist. Go ahead, tell me all about it.