This study focuses on how interviewees meet with the setting of semi-structured and open interviews as a “test", on the interactional negotiation of several aspects of the interview situation, and on the consequences for the acquired data status, in order to define the social forces that impose on the ethnographic locale (Burawoy 1998). The example uses data from research on social class and coding orientations in experiential parental accounts of child protection procedures in Flanders.