Following a Nurse Researcher article highlighting silences in narrative interviews, Philip John Archard and Michelle O’Reilly examine non-verbal data and how it can be captured

In a recent Nurse Researcher article, Durkin et al (2020) describe the challenges Durkin encountered as part of a doctoral study which involved narrative interviews addressing patients’ experiences of receiving or expressing compassion in hospital. In this informative account, the authors make interesting comments regarding silences and about the role of researchers’ previous professional experience and the transferrable and non-transferrable ‘skills’ brought to interviews. We want to add some additional thoughts on these matters.