Data Analysis

The initial process for analysing the interview data was based in a thematic analysis: a categorizing strategy for qualitative data – a means to move from a broad reading of the data towards discovering patterns and developing themes. It is not tied into any particular epistemology or discipline. Over 400 000 words of transcribed interview data were loaded into Nvivo for sorting and in order to code, identify and organise the recurrent and relevant themes emerging from the data. A first close reading of the data was organised according to the structuring of the questionnaire, identifying the experiential themes drawn from the data, that were to later form the basis of the analysis chapters.

Constructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland

94 In the process of theme coding the data was fragmented and clustered for the purposes of generalisation and identification of specifics, and so did not remain as complete narratives. As Hollway & Jefferson warn, there is weakness in the thematic coding and clustering method in that ‘cases with identical codings’ may not be similar ‘once personal meanings are taken into account’ (2000:5). Thus any generalisations made from theme coded data need to also be based in individual contextual biography as well as comparative demographic factors. To this end the whole narrative of each particular respondent was examined to identify any links and contradictions, and ‘participant portraits’ were created in order to retain the gestalt of individual narratives.

Unfortunately these participant portraits were not possible to include in the final research report due to space limitations for the thesis. [A table with information pertaining to Participant Portraits is in Appendix.]

Several themes were suggested by initial examination of the data, which was then grouped into the four data analysis chapters: Gender Practices, Formative Practices, Intimate Practices, and Medical Practices. Several additional themed chapters had to be excluded from the final report due to space considerations. The emphasis of the data analysis was on how transgender individuals produce the meaning of their identities from the practical experiences of their lives. The analysis begins by demonstrating how participants utilise dominant cultural discourses to explain gender variant identity.

These include childhood experiences, social exclusion and the influence of past relationships on present action. It then goes on to examine how participants’ meaning making can be ambiguous and contradictory, and also how participants variously accept and challenge meanings available to them. Finally, the analysis shows how meaning making can break down, and the consequences of this for the individual’s sense of self. The meaning of the category ‘transgender’, although not fixed, was invoked in different ways as part of the process of asserting identity. The relationship of participants to sexuality, families, medical practices, transgender communities and social attitudes was complex, and the interviews captured nuanced, multifaceted and dynamic processes of identification and relationships.

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4.4.2 Narrative Interpretation

The second method of data analysis utilised for the current study is situated in the assumption that all factual representations of reality are interpretations - because all are narratively constructed. This is particularly true of social research because all social communication takes place through narratives which express and empower discourses, and it is narratives that constitute both the data and the interpretative analysis in the current study. A narrative approach operates on two levels: interpretations of the social world in the form of participants’ accounts; and how these are in turn interpreted and constructed in the narrative form of the researcher’s report.

A narrative understanding that individuals compose stories to make sense of their lives is particularly useful for analysing the life histories gathered in the current research.

Narrative analysis is concerned with deciphering the subjective meanings generated by the understandings and interpretations participants make of the events of their lives.

Narrative inquiry can draw on methodology from different disciplines, and the current study applies the techniques of phenomenology and symbolic interactionism to analyse narratives. Phenomenology involves listening to how research participants describe and interpret their own practices while bracketing researcher judgement, allowing for an insight into the meanings and interpretations that participants attribute to their world - valid in and of themselves. Symbolic interactionism provides a more removed analysis of participants’ possible motives for behaviour, understanding that meaning is constructed through social discourse, it is not inherent in an act or experience. Narrative

‘truth’ is not mimetic, it is not an exact representation of reality. It is always a constructed account of experience, a reconstruction of events determined by context and audience. Of special interest to the current research was the development of counter-narratives or the stories that existed in tension with expected narratives, discussed throughout the data analysis chapters.

Within the symbolic interactionist paradigm, the work of Kenneth Plummer (1983, 1995, 2001) has been most influential for social science qualitative research, in life interviewing, and the personal experience narrative form particularly in relation to non-normative identities (Bornat, 2008; Bryman, 2008; Denzin & Lincoln, 2008; Weeks, 2001). Plummer theorises how individuals tell stories in order to ‘assemble a sense of

Constructing identities, reclaiming subjectivities, reconstructing selves: an interpretative study of transgender practices Scotland

96 self and identity’ (1995:172) in which ‘coherence and catharsis’ (1995:174) are key motivations of the participant. He suggests that the role of the researcher is ‘self-reflexive: to see that much social research is itself a story telling process’ (1995:179).

With reference to the difficulty of verifying the truth of interview accounts, Plummer emphasises the socially constructed nature of the story telling process: ‘Storytelling and story reading are indeed social inventions, fictions, fabrications. They cannot be otherwise’ (1995:167). He suggests an approach to analysing storytelling: ‘take them seriously in their own right - not as historical truth but as narrative truth …. the work of stories in lives in the present’ (1995:171), and…‘Stories help people to say certain things at certain times and in certain places, and likewise not to say them at others’

(Plummer, 1995:172). Referring to Plummer’s (1995) distinction between ‘historical truth’ and ‘narrative truth’, Hines argues that her research: ‘addresses narratives rather than facts, and all narratives are of their moment and are temporally mutable as is identity’ (2007:199). This is an approach that informs the current research project, along with the implications that narratives are constructions, and the task of the researcher is to attempt to understand the meanings these have for research participants.