Nothing speaks for itself. Confronted with a mountain of impressions, documents and field notes, the qualitative researcher faces the difficult and challenging task of making sense of what has been learned. (Denzin, 2004:447)
The method of analysis chosen for this study is thematic analysis. Thematic sequencing involves the connection of events by themes rather than by time. Plummer (2001) places thematic analysis at the centre of a continuum of ‘construction’ designed to depict the problems of editing and
interpretation faced by researchers. I believe that this approach will best preserve the integrity of the themes and issues pertinent to my participants’
lives.
I was confident that I knew the transcripts well enough to make the use of data analysis technologies, such as that offered by NVivo, unnecessary. I wanted to preserve my sense of connection with the participants and their narratives and liked the idea of recognising themes from the transcripts more organically and naturally than if they were coded and analysed using a software package. One of the advantages of conducting and typing up the interviews myself and including everything that had been said (rather than just those parts that appeared ‘relevant’) was that I developed a detailed knowledge of the transcripts as they emerged, painfully and slowly from my computer. This stage acted as a first close reading. I transcribed the
interviews in the order in which they had been conducted. As I was listening to the voice recordings and transcribing, I kept and updated a separate document in which I copied extracts from the women’s testimonies into different categories as I went along, looking initially for moments, ideas and patterns which were either corroborated by other interviews or ‘stood out’ for some reason.
When I had finished transcribing and had sent all the interviews back to the participants for checking and amendment, I conducted a second line-by-line close reading of the transcripts. Rather than looking at them in the order they had been conducted, this time I divided them into geographical groups,
‘North’ and ‘South’, and ranged the participants within each group from eldest to youngest. I then re-read them carefully looking for new themes and for additional data to corroborate or challenge the themes previously
identified. After the 467,000 words of transcripts had been listened to, read and re-read I had developed a sense of how the narratives could be
organised. Some of the themes, such as loneliness and the role of groups in offering social support, were obvious given the scope of the research and it would have been surprising if they did not appear in the participants’
narratives. Others were less tangible and it took longer to recognise the patterns of responses that I eventually clustered around mobility,
belongingness and fit, for example. By the end of the second reading I had identified the following broad themes:
• Realisation, coming out and relationships
• Ageing
• Groups and communities
• Feminism
• Class, education, mobility and privilege
• Loneliness
• Belongingness and fit
• Living near an LGBT community
As I stated in section 1.4, I originally set out to research loneliness and the role of coetaneous groups in alleviating social isolation. Braun and Clarke (2006) remind us that the selection of themes from a given data set can be influenced in different ways; driven by the data itself, influenced by theory or the researcher’s own analytic interest in the area. Drawing on Boyatzis (1998) who distinguishes between ‘gross’ and ‘intricate’ aspects available in the ‘raw information’ (p.30), Braun and Clarke identify two levels of thematic analysis: semantic or explicit analysis where the themes are identified within the surface meanings of the data and latent/interpretative where there is an attempt to theorise the significance of patterns. My analysis of the rich narratives produced in this study aims to incorporate both levels by looking at and beyond what participants have said as well as capturing the ‘brilliant shafts of light and colour’ Mason (2011:77) suggests exist in even the smallest facets, but I am mindful that in doing so I may influence and distort
the meaning made by the narrators. The themes listed previously exist at a semantic level; participants talked explicitly about loneliness and groups across the life course. A crucial emergent theme is that of cleft or dislocated habitus; a way of understanding the situation of those who have been
socially mobile put forward by Bourdieu (2000) to explain the difficulties of working-class scholars in elite education. It is used in this study as a key analytical tool with which to understand the social and emotional
implications of multiple contemporary mobilities.
Structure
I originally considered using temporal location as a structuring device for analysing the data. I felt that this method would provide chronological continuity and a sense of how the passing of time played out in participants’
lives. When I trialled this approach it revealed a significant disadvantage;
discussions of coming out or relationships with families in women’s past and in their present - even future - lives, became dislocated; fragmented across several chapters.
The second organisational structure considered was the arrangement of data according to the generation of the participants. In this way, each
analysis chapter could be devoted to the stories offered by women born in a certain generational period. This would provide continuity to the participants’
stories and expose the different experiences of generations across time and through societal change, for example, contrasting Val’s very real and
lifelong sense of her own unimportance as the third girl born to already stretched parents in 1940’s wartime, with the narratives of women born in
the 1950s, some of whom were adoptive or co-parents with university degrees and careers. Ultimately though, life stories are not that
straightforward. Gwennie, for example, born in 1953 is one of the younger participants yet has never had an intimate loving relationship with a woman and has only just started to attend a lesbian group where she ‘can admit who and what I am’. Additionally, using this method separated the testimonies of women who have talked about social mobility through education and the subsequent impact on their sense of ‘fit’ or belonging in various situations.
Although these methods offered many advantages, including keeping the women’s stories more connected and showing the impact of generational and societal change, I felt they were outweighed by a potential loss of connectedness. I have chosen simply to structure the narratives around the selected themes. In order to make the generational and ‘human’ aspects of these stories as clear and present as possible, and allow readers to
establish and retain a picture of the narrators, the next two chapters start with a vignette featuring one participant’s narrative highlighting the
intersection of mobilities across her life course. A detailed participant biography and an overview of the groups can be found in Appendix 9. In order to orient readers, a short piece of information about each participant will be stated the first time they appear in each analysis chapter.
Absences and presences
In any research only a minute amount of original data will survive to the final
‘product’; this project is no different. Firstly, there are the stories of the
women who have never attended social groups, perhaps because they are isolated by geography, poverty, racism or fear. Then there are those who were present but did not feel able to come forward and be interviewed.
Finally, there are the women who were interviewed but, as a consequence of the way I have selected the themes and organised the data, have ‘lost their voice’ to some lesser or greater extent. It is important to recognise that the stories that do survive are not the only ones and are not necessarily representative of the ones that have been omitted whether through self (de)selection or my choice of themes and narrators. In the final analysis it is not possible to address all of the themes raised in this data set and I have elected to focus my attention on the following:
• Intersections of gender role, sexual identity and class
‘transgressions’: Habitus dislocation and contemporary mobilities
• Loneliness and other challenges: Communities of belonging and resistance across the life course
• Affinity groups and safe spaces: Creating support networks and resisting heteronormativity in older age
When deliberating on these themes I returned to the original research aims and questions, set out at the beginning of the research process. The
questions, written before the interviews took place, were narrow and focussed almost exclusively on the groups attended by the participants, asking about group composition, benefits conferred and class differentials in experience. At the start of the research, my sole aim was to investigate the benefits of groups to lonely older lesbians and bisexual women and
determine what kind of group composition would offer optimum benefit. As the transcripts grew in number, I became aware that many interviews were
taken up with talking about things other than loneliness. Richard and Brown (2006) suggest that my experience is not uncommon:
This discrepancy between what one expects to learn in the field and what one actually learns in the field frequently occurs in qualitative research. (p.54)
The groups still feature hugely in the interviews and, as I had anticipated, participants discussed the benefits they derived, their preferences for exclusively lesbian or mixed company and the role of groups in buffering loneliness. But we also talked across a range of topics, intimate, ordinary and everyday. It became clear that the interviews created a space for a conversation about ageing, gender, sexual identity, education, social class and mobility and, most significantly, the intersection of these diverse, multi-layered and complex aspects of human life and experience. Very quickly, I realised that my original research aims and indeed some of my interview questions were pedestrian and pragmatic and would not serve to capture the essence of these fascinating lives. Although the research does function on this ‘policy and practice’ level and reveals important information about the organisation type, composition and benefits as well as revealing some of the hierarchies, disharmonies and exclusion zones of lesbian and bisexual social space, it also operates on another, more elusive and less tangible plane. In many ways, this research is less about groups for old/er lesbian and bisexual women and more about the multiple mobilities, experienced across the life course, that have led this generation of women to seek
friendships, social interaction and support in groups predicated upon shared age and sexual identity. These ideas will be explored in the subsequent chapters, which start with an analysis of how the participants’ social class,
gender and sexual identities have positioned them as older women in twenty-first century Britain.
Chapter Four: Social mobility as a site of habitus dislocation