 Levy, a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, to describe his psychodynamically informed approach to interviewing during his anthropological fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal.A key distinction in person-centered interviewing is that between interviewees as "informants" and as "respondents".As Levy and Hollan describe it,

There is a significant difference between asking a Tahitian interviewee something like "Please describe for me exactly how and why supercision (a penis-mutilating rite of passage) is done by Tahitians," and asking him "Can you tell me about "your" supercision?