A NALYSING THE DATA : INDUCTIVE APPROACHES

The analysis of the data chiefly started after most of the interviews had been transcribed, although the data collection and interpretation were an iterative process, conducted simultaneously (Leavy 2011). From the beginning, I felt that I needed to find a guiding thread throughout my work. While considering various leading scholarly concepts, I decided to focus on ethnicity and nationhood in relation to the other topics of gender, performance and “social identity”.

As a result of this initial phase of interpretation, at the end of the fieldwork, I had developed a relatively clear idea about the type of topics I wished to explore in my articles. I knew that demonstrations were an important topic because these were frequently mentioned during the interviews. Furthermore, the relationship between nationalism and performance was quite popular in the academic world and scholarly publications at the time. Throughout the research process, I sought ways to account for the diversity and richness of the narratives collected, despite the presence of some highly influential and antagonistic discourses. I also always felt the need to retell the stories I had heard and still felt attracted by the historians’ approach of constructing narratives of the past. At the same time, I was puzzled by the interviewees’ need for recognition and sought ways to address this issue. Finally, as already mentioned, it was also important for me to cover topics linked to questions of gender.

Although I had in mind specific topics that I wished to scrutinise when I started the analysis, I broadly followed an inductive approach, starting from the data and developing the themes, categories and explanations (Creswell 2013). I thus started the analysis of each of the three articles by immersing myself in the fully-transcribed interviews as well as my field and interview notes (Shopes 2002). The result of this thorough reading was a list of possible questions, repeated themes and explanations. It also helped me to narrow down the focus of the analysis; for example, it was during this phase of reading that I decided to scrutinise the construction of masculinities, given the highly limited presence of women in the narratives.

I analysed the data with a focus on two forms of inductive strategies. On the one hand, I wished to underline the main themes and categories emanating from the data. I thus opted for a strategy inspired by grounded theory that is commonly used by oral historians in the field of social sciences and rests on the transversal coding of the data, thus doing mainly thematic analyisis (Leavy 2011). On the other hand, I was interested in preserving the entirety of the narratives in

order to see their logic and chose to draw on methodological insights from narrative research, thus conducting thematic narrative analysis (Riessman 2008). Given the great number of interviews collected, I decided to use software, HyperResearch, to code the data. This helped me to keep better track of the analysis process by developing more easily codes across the interviews, combining and reflecting on the coded segments and navigating between the different interviews more easily.

For the first and third articles, I adopted a similar strategy. On the one hand, I analysed the interviews following a transversal method inspired by grounded theory, as described above. On the other hand, I also considered each interview separately. First, I started coding the interviews and my notes following an “initial coding” strategy (Charmaz 2014). I carefully read the transcriptions and notes, sorting out the data with a very open mind and aiming not to exclude any future possible theoretical framework and explanation (Charmaz 2014). As the analysis advanced, the codes were regularly renamed and adapted, which implied a back and forth movement between the early analysed data and the newly-examined ones. In particular, I became more aware of the importance of “values coding”, applying codes to data “that reflect a participant’s values, attitudes, and beliefs, representing his or her perspectives or worldview”

(Saldana 2009: 131). These codes are relevant for this research because they provide hints at the shared discourses available in the individual’s social environment (Saldana 2009). I kept notes of the process of developing and refining the codes in an “analytic memo” (Saldana 2009:

118). Writing these notes helped me to pause and reflect on the emerging categories and their interrelationships.

After completing the “initial coding” of all of the interview transcriptions and notes, I considered all of the codes that had emerged and started reorganising them. I grouped them thematically and reflected on the relationships between and within the categories. I also considered which categories were relevant to the particular article and which could be abandoned. As the main categories and themes emerged, I chose the main topic of the article and rearranged of all the categories around this central topic (Saldana 2009). These decisions were based on my personal interests and understanding that developed during the research process. They also rested on the theoretical and background literature on the topic.

Second, I also relied on narrative research to analyse the data. The interviews were crafted in the form of narratives: to make sense of their past engagement and communicate it to me, the

interviewees naturally told me many different types of stories, such as their life story, the

“history of the Albanian people” and the story of how they first became involved in activism.

Following narrative theory, I consider the narratives “to organize a sequence of events into a whole so that the significance of each event can be understood through its relation to that whole”

(Elliott 2005: 3) Thus, I felt, from a very early stage, that I needed a way to analyse the interviews and the various narratives they contained in their entirety without breaking them down into units through a transversal analysis, as in grounded theory. There are many different narrative analysis approaches (Elliott 2005), however, so the challenge was to pick the most appropriate method(s) for the data available and the type of explanations I was seeking. This led me to explore many methods throughout the research. One of the main problems encountered was that narrative analysis is often applied to a small number of texts and consists of time-intensive close reading that pays attention to syntax and language features or to the structure of the narrative (Abrams 2016). Such methods were inappropriate for the number of interviews I wished to analyse. I developed different methods for analysing the data collected.

Most of the strategies I used relied on “thematic analysis”, concentrating on the content of the text rather than on its structure or performative aspects (Kohler Riessman 2004: 706).

In the first and third articles, I read through the interview, identifying and noting down the narrator’s “basic storyline” composed of the elements of his or her narrative that appeared important to him or her (Maxwell and Miller 2010). In a second phase, I grouped the narratives according to their thematic similarities and differences. At the same time, I refined the transversal categories. Moving back and forth between the two methods helped me to identify the most important categories in my data as well as develop a core theme of enquiry. At this stage, I combined the two methods in order to provide a central focus to my article and start working on a first draft.

For the second article, I chiefly renounced any analysis across the interviews and decided to consider each interview as a whole. This article, however, developed after several rounds of transversal coding that I partly used for the other articles or abandoned before undertaking any further analytical step. I thus started the analysis with many categories, questions and possible explanations in my mind. Again, I turned to HyperResearch in order to analyse the interviews, given the great amount of data to process. As I progressed through the interviews, I developed a specific approach that combined different methods. For this reason, I moved many times between the various interviews.

Broadly, in the first phase of the analysis, I pursued three different strategies. First, I observed the structure of the interview by considering the sequencing of the narrative with a focus on

“the broad storyline, including episodes and turning points in the plot” (Kohler Riessman 2008:

68). Second, I identified the main narratives and themes communicated within the interview and labelled them, such as “the Albanian people in History” or “the Albanians in Switzerland”.

Third, as in grounded theory, I applied “initial coding” to the entire interview, with a particular focus on “value coding” (Saldana 2009). In a second phase, I considered the findings emanating from each of the three steps and grouped the main themes and narratives as well as the “values codes” within the same interview. I ended up with a small number of categories. In a third phase, I reflected on the relationships between the main themes, narratives and values as well as with the findings on the structure of the interview. Again, I grouped these results into a small number of relevant topics. At that stage, I started broadening the analysis by introducing theoretical concerns, thus shifting to a more deductive type of approach, and setting the interviews in their social and historical contexts. I then conducted the same three-step method for each interview. Finally, I organised the findings emanating from each interview in a table, which allowed me to compare them and finally draw a gradient typology (Kohler Riessman 2004). I then started writing the article on the basis of this typology.

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