Coding and data analysis

My intention was to analyse using the NVivo programme; after ten interviews this “crashed” irretrievably. Subsequent analysis was done by repeated readings and second and third level coding. Each transcript was fully coded (Charmaz 2006, 70). I began with a notional code set but soon abandoned much of this as I read, re-read and annotated transcripts and tried to respond to non-verbal signs on the audio recordings. This produced a taxonomy of around forty codes, some of them with extensive subsets. A number were abandoned because they were my own projections which did not materialize in dialogue. Time, for example, had initially seemed to me to be a central conceptual issue after reading Zerubavel and Roth; chaplains did not respond to prompts in this direction and did not voluntarily reflect upon time as an issue in their work. Other codes were grouped or combined so that, for example, ritual, liturgy and restorative practice are now seen as categories occupying the same conceptual space. The chapter headings represent the aggregation of codes.

3.2 Prison parables: chaplains as story tellers

I did not set out to collect stories and have not intentionally sought them; nevertheless they kept on coming. Initially I underestimated their

importance to the teller and their significance as integral parts of a total narrative, both individual and institutional. From the beginning I had coded ‘story telling’ and ‘story keeping’ as components of pastoral ministry since chaplains could be seen as transmitters of stories from the Judaeo-Christian scriptures and since Christ himself made extensive use of moral fable. Further, I was able to aggregate my own and others’ experience of prisoners telling their stories. I was, though, unprepared for chaplains to story part of their response (Feldman et al, 2004, 148) to my questions and had to

reappraise this feature in terms of Coffey and Atkinson’s observation that “Social actors organise their lives and experiences through stories and in doing so make sense of them.” (Coffey and Atkinson 1996, 68). Feldman et al

66

(2004, 147) make a similar point in relation to individuals’ making sense of organisations and their place within them:

Stories are useful both to participants and observers of organizations because they are a basic tool that individuals use to communicate and create understanding with other people and for themselves. Stories are used to make sense of organizational life.

Czarniawska (2004, 42) draws attention to the mimetic value of stories, not as plot but as but as carriers of information about organizations. She goes on to elucidate other important aspects of “the role stories play in the drama of organizational power and resistance” as allowing access to the emotional life of an organization, and as revealing the nostalgia present in organizations. She concludes that “stories might not tell all about work-worlds, but they do tell a lot.” (2004,42) This suggests how personal narrative and storying can acquire political significance, as in Daniel’s narrative (Appendix 10) and Gough’s story at the beginning of Chapter 1.

It became necessary, then, to examine the form of the stories both for the manifest intention of their telling and for their latent content and potentially multiple significances which might re-contextualise the story or

interpenetrate with other situations, individuals and experiences. I have chosen to delimit the term “story” in a similar way to Feldman et al (2004, 148) as “a sequence of events, experiences or actions with a plot that ties together different parts into a meaningful whole.” Coffey and Atkinson (1996,55) cite Denzin’s broad definition “as a story of a sequence of events that has significance for the narrator and her audience…. narratives are temporal and logical.” Since the stories which I have been told occurred in response to opportunities to reflect and observe I have worked on the basis of story as a subset of an encompassing narrative (Feldman et al 2004, 149) or narrative superstructure (Cortazzi, 1993, repr 2003, 71) within which it is embedded. The narrative, then, is the whole response which may comprise several components, including more than one story. It is closely

contextualised not only by the nature of the invitation in the process of co- construction by researcher and respondent but by the space within which the construction occurs, including the interview site (chapel, office, staff canteen

67

or wherever) and the time of the interview (lunchtime, evening, the day after an incident), so their wider applicability appears to be limited. On the other hand, it is possible, likely even, that the accounts which emerge in interview have been told on earlier occasions and in different circumstances and in response to a different prompt. To this extent the accounts may be, albeit unwittingly, rehearsed and refined (Coffey & Atkinson 1996, 57) so that details may be differently selected, prioritised and emphasised. Such accounts are performative in the sense that the telling of them is integral to the narrator’s total sum of actions. Therefore, while the components of narrative and story may have tightly circumscribed applicability, the telling of them has a validity which is embedded not so much in the details of a life history but in the authenticity of its telling and in the susceptibility of that telling to formal analysis.

As I indicated in 3.1.7, this can give rise to the kind of ethical and personal dilemma noted by Frank (2002,115) which is especially poignant for practitioner researchers in small, clearly bounded professional groups and arises from the implicitly ethical relationship between researcher and respondent in which the latter becomes part of “that person’s on-going

struggle…. towards a moral life.” The relationship between the two, however, does not and should not imply tacit acceptance of the morality of the story, nor that it is capable of bearing the relevance apparently intended. The same relationship should also embrace the possibility that a story might even signify the opposite of what appears from prompts or other contextual

factors to have been the intention of telling it (Frank 2002, 115; Feldman et al 2004, 151). The relationship, however, is predicated not only upon the

interplay of researcher/respondent but also upon a dialogue between peer practitioners, colleagues, friends, and even spouses. Kvale (2006, 497) draws attention to “the ambiguity of the interview relationship between a close personal and an instrumental relation, with the interviewer being both a participant in, and an observer of, the interview relationship.”

Critical analysis in this setting has the potential to appear as a vitiation of the trust upon which the research was thought to have been based, as if personal

68

stories have been stolen and reworked into an antithetical, threatening form: one respondent went so far as to warn me that, “in doing this, you risk losing friends.” Other respondents, though, appreciated that narratives should be treated as accounts and performances (3.1.4, 38). I examine the interviews (dialogues in effect) analytically as performative acts “through which identities are enacted, actions are justified and recounted events are

retrospectively constructed” (Atkinson & Delamont 2006, 167). It is all the more important for a practitioner researcher to “retain a degree of distance from the narrative materials we collect.” (2006,169)

All of this argues the need for a template which can be laid across the stories to identify broad categories of similarity. Since my focus is on the people and their experiences, I have avoided analytical techniques whose complexity of detail might veer away from this. “The use of formal, structured tools of language description inevitably provides a perspective which draws the analysis away from participants’ situated knowledge and understandings.” (Tusting & Maybin 2007, 578). This implies tensions between “a more ‘closed’ focus on linguistic text and a more ‘open’ sensitivity to context and to the role of the researcher.” (2007, 576).

My focus, then, is on the narratives and stories as social phenomena (Atkinson & Delamont 2006, 170) within the temporal context of the

respondent’s biography as the storying of their life and the material context of its telling, not only geographical but analogously temporal, an analysis of the situated uses of story rather than the processes of story.

The template I have used initially is a version of the Labov and Waletsky six part structure (Cortazzi 1993, 44-49):

Narrative template

STRUCTURE QUESTION

Abstract What was this about? Orientation Who? What? When? Where? Complication Then what happened? Evaluation So what? Result What finally happened? Coda

69

I adopted this model because it demonstrates the constructed qualities of the story. Since the stories were not invited but were introduced into the greater narrative by the respondents it is possible to assert that many chaplains – probably not only Anglicans – construct or reconstruct their biographies through storying. They are certainly not alone in this but the significance for this group is that story making and performing is, as my data show, a part of their ministry valued both by themselves and by those to whom they

minister.

Coffey and Atkinson (1996, 61) recognise that this is neither the only

possible analytical model nor one to be applied rigidly; Cortazzi (49) suggests that it can be supplemented by lexical signalling (54):

Lexical signals