Conducting the interviews

I anticipated that un-structured or semi-structured interviews were more likely to generate narratives and encourage storytelling (Riessman 1990). However, I was mindful that even the most unstructured interviews still have structure, not least because the researcher has a role in choosing the topics, deciding

how to ask questions and analyse data. The researcher also initiates the exchange and there is a degree of self interest in so doing (Collins 1998). I encouraged my research participants to tell their own stories about moving to Spain and their experiences of community. When I piloted the interview with Vera, it became clear to me that to impose the structure that I had initially devised would limit the scope for narration and participation.

As indicated previously, I use the term ‘data generation’ rather than collection (Mason 2002) since I was not a neutral collector of information, rather my role in constructing the knowledge produced needs to be taken into account in line with my epistemological position. However, my approach is not entirely

inductive since I engaged with research methods literature and the body of literature on community prior to embarking on the research in Spain (Stanley and Wise 1990). It was important that I gained a contextual understanding of community and migration to Spain and this became refined as the literature review developed.

I formulated a set of predetermined questions (see Appendix 5), which were designed to generate data to answer my intellectual puzzle (Mason 2002). However, I did not rigidly stick to these questions: each interview had a momentum of its own and although the identified issues were covered they were not addressed in a particular order. I began each interview with a ‘grand tour’ question (Spradley 1979), asking each participant, ‘can you tell me something about yourself and how you came to be in Spain?’ All interviews began with this question but from here onwards each interview was different. For some women this was enough; they then went on to talk about why they had moved to Spain and what were the events leading to this particular move, how they felt about it and what they expected.

The issues I wanted to cover included the women’s length of time in Spain and origins within the UK and I also explored whether they had lived outside the UK before. I wanted to know what the women and their partners did in terms of employment before moving to Spain and whether they had children. I

was interested in where their children lived and whether they saw them regularly as I wondered whether looser kinship ties made movement away from the country of origin any easier, or if it had any other impact. I asked about social contacts, beginning with life in Spain. I examined who people saw, how often and under what circumstances, the kind of people and the kind of social activities they engaged in and how this compared to the UK. As mentioned earlier, the conversations I had with people prior to beginning this work seemed to suggest that life in Spain was socially much richer than in the UK and I wanted to examine this further. I was keen to discover whether women felt that their new social life in Spain satisfactorily replaced that in the UK or were there friends (as well as family) from the UK whom they missed. I wanted to find out whether this was differently experienced and narrated by those who wished to stay and those who wanted to return.

I asked whether or not people were learning or intended to learn Spanish. Again, this relates back to some of the early conversations that I had with migrants from the UK who did not appear to have any intention of learning Spanish. I was keen to find out the reasons for not doing so if this proved to be the case. Related to this was the issue of whether migrants from the UK mixed with local Spanish people. I have already noted that the urbanisations were mainly populated by Northern European migrants with practically no Spanish people living there apart from a very small number who had bought holiday homes, but I was keen to discover how they felt about this and whether moving to the area had lived up to expectations.

My first allusion to community entailed raising the issue of whether women were involved in any ‘community activities’. All the urbanisations were subjected to committee rule, supposedly democratically elected, to make decisions about the running of each area. This was not exclusively what I wanted to find out though and I let people use their own interpretation as to what was meant. Similarly, I was also interested in whether women would have been involved in any such activities in the UK to draw comparisons later on. I was mindful of the fact that the women that I interviewed had all retired, often relatively recently, and that they could possibly be experiencing the first

flush of ‘retirement bliss’. I was also aware that it could be difficult for them to compare their (working) life in the UK to their life in retirement in Spain, since for some, this would possibly have meant that they would still be working, for others, it would have meant having a different kind of retirement. Here, I also wanted to explore women’s expectations of retirement in Spain and how it measured up to such expectations.

I wanted to discover what women liked and disliked about living in Spain – my interest here was in more than the climate and the food – rather the

experiences that people were having in terms of being integrated into some ‘whole’ (and finding out what indeed this whole was) and any experiences regarding segregation from Spanish people. I was interested in how they felt about Spain itself, its culture, its people and find out how much they actually knew about the place they were living in. Of particular interest was where women felt home was and by association where then became ‘away’. I wanted to address this issue by getting people to talk about their feelings about community in the UK and Spain. I also wanted to focus on more

practical issues and revisit the issues surrounding ‘community help’ or general reciprocity or where people would go for help if they needed it. I asked about women’s knowledge of organisations in Spain that would provide this help and also the links and networks that would provide it if necessary. I hoped here to discover whether any reciprocity existed among the Britons and wanted the women themselves to make a direct comparison with what they would do in Britain if they needed any help in the UK. I was keen to elicit their feelings about community and whether being part of one was wholly positive or

whether there were in fact any negative aspects or constraints to this. Finally I revisited the issue of whether living in Spain lived up to initial expectations.

The above outline of intended topics was not applied in the same way in each interview. Although I asked each interviewee the grand tour question, there the conformity ended. No interview exactly followed the format that I prepared; instead, each one was different. Some women were more forthcoming than others and clearly had issues which they wanted to raise and often, this addressed those aspects which I wished to explore. I used direct questions

when the issues were not covered by women’s narratives. Since the order and structure of each interview differed so widely, interaction between

research participants and myself as the researcher also differed. The length of time of the interviews ranged from one to two and half hours, with the average interview taking one hour and 30 minutes. The interviews conducted with Vera and Deirdre, the two women I knew prior to undertaking the research were not significantly different in length to the average. I offered all women the

opportunity to read the transcribed interview but nobody wanted to do so.