A hermeneutic perspective

In addition to the phenomenological perspective explored above, there was also a significant hermeneutic element in my enquiry. I take this to mean that my understanding of the nature of my participants’ experience(s) has come about through an interpretation of their words – which are, in turn, an interpretation of their own perception(s) of their experience(s). There is therefore a substantial and weighty responsibility on the part of researchers engaged in

hermeneutic enquiry to capture that nature of their participants’ lifeworlds accurately. In order to be successful in this respect, the researcher needs to “make meaning” for the reader (Richardson & Adams St Pierre, 2008) who may not be familiar with the experience being explored. This requires a contemplation of the link between part and whole – the

hermeneutic circle – which brings together different relationships (Smith et al., 2009). In my project, this meant recognising that the words my participants used (“parts”) created

utterances (“the whole”). These utterances, however, were only a part of the whole

interview, and one interview was only a part of the participant’s whole lifeworld – and any incidents or experiences they chose to recount were only a part of their whole lives. The hermeneutic circle also came to the fore when I moved from the lifeworld of one participant out into shared experience (which forms the basis of what I say in Chapter 4) and also when I went from shared experience back into subjective lifeworlds (for example, when I asked a participant whether what other people had said resonated with them). In order to get an overarching phenomenological perspective on these participants’ lives, I found it vital to move around this hermeneutic circle continuously, exploring both parts and wholes, in an iterative manner, rather than viewing the research project as a series of sequential steps. (I return to this in 3.13.)

In a research context, hermeneutic interpretation occurs on a number of levels. Firstly, participants choose what to reveal and how to portray themselves to the interviewer – already, we can see a deliberation on the part of the participants about what they choose to disclose about themselves and their lifeworlds. It may be, as Birch & Miller (2000) posit, that participants re-invent, and even redact, critical incidents from their past, and re-cast both those incidents and themselves in an edited (and possibly more positive) light; this re-

invention may be conscious or subconscious. Secondly, the researcher must then select what to highlight from the participants’ accounts. This selection process is complex and

subjective, and, given the intimate and profound relationship between the researcher and the participants, between the researcher and the data, and between the researcher and the

interpretation itself, anyone working hermeneutically needs to be cautious and explicit about what and how they choose to interpret and present (Brinkmann &

Kvale, 2015) [3.13]. As a result, my analysis and

discussion of my participants’ experiences (in Chapter 4) can only ever be a subjective interpretation of what my participants told me. Since it is impossible to discount

the personal in any kind of qualitative enquiry (Kvale, 2007), I acknowledge that I cannot represent (or even “re-present”) my participants’ experiences fully accurately. This has been termed the “double hermeneutic” (Giddens, 1976; 2013; Smith et al., 2009), which

problematises how researchers construct these “interpretations of interpretations”.

[3.13_{] Deciding what to write about}

was a thorny problem, which caused me long periods of reflection. I did not wish to miss anything which seemed important, but was also aware of the need to be succinct – even a doctoral thesis has a word limit. In 6.3, I discuss in more depth how I decided what to prioritise in my account.

However, hermeneutics can be viewed as being more than just a two-layered construct. Alvesson & Skoldberg (2000), in fact, argue that it takes place on four levels, as follows:

1. The participant interprets her own experience(s) for the interviewer-researcher. 2. The interviewer-researcher decides what to write about, and how.

3. The critical interviewer-researcher reflects on any social and political implications which the interpretation throws up.

4. The interviewer-researcher engages in a period of subjective reflexion, clarifying why they chose to include some aspects of the participant’s lifeworld and not others, in the light of personal biases and subjectivities.

Alvesson & Skoldberg recommend that the researcher view these four aspects as layers, and that the research should “glide” (ibid., p271) between them; in 4.2, I show how I applied this to my own project.

The way language is used is a central consideration in hermeneutic interpretation. Language is considered to be the object of experience, and the linguistic turn has opened up new and varied vistas for enquiry (Alvesson, 2002; Dunne et al., 2005; Schmidt, 2006). To illustrate, hermeneutic researchers may elect to explore a participant’s use of discoursal aspects of language (Pellauer, 2007) – in other words, what language do participants choose to use to produce a unified, meaningful and purposeful text? Alternatively, they may wish to explore the organisational moves which characterise spoken narratives to identify what aspects of the experience are foregrounded by participants (Alvesson, 2002). They may explore

phonological features of speech which affect meaning, such as intonation and sentence stress, or how metaphor is used in constructing meaning (Ryan & Bernard, 2003; Schmitt, 2005; Smith et al., 2009; Newby, 2014). However, in my research, this linguistic turn raised complications. My participants were all non-native

speakers, and whilst non-native speakers at post-graduate level are fluent and eloquent, there are some limits to their language competence, and there is therefore a “trade-off” (Cortazzi et al., 2011:509) between

articulating complex ideas and expression [3.14].

Metaphor and other linguistic tropes are less frequent in – and often absent from – non-native speech

[3.14_{] This is particularly the case}

when discussing unfamiliar or abstract topics, since the brain’s meaning-making capacity focuses on the cognitively-complex message, rather than on controlling the accuracy of the language, and there are few situations which are more unfamiliar or abstract than being asked to examine one’s own subjective experience in a research interview situation.

(Prodromou, 2003; Medgyes, 2017) as they are semantically and cognitively complex, and a narrower lexical range may mean that nuance of meaning is not fully attended to. Non-native speaker participants may have a more restricted phonological range (Jenkins, 2000), which can affect attitudinal meaning, and cultural mores relating to the structure of narratives may be at odds with those of the researcher. I write more about the implications of the linguistic turn in qualitative research and how this shapes research with participants who may not use language in predictable – and anticipated – ways in 4.2.