Data Analysis and Writing up

As Smith (2010) points out, IPA research is not a prescriptive approach but to be entered into in a spirit of creativity and personal skill. As the researcher I wanted to find the “balance between stricture and flexibility” (Smith, 2010, p.189) and therefore familiarized myself enough with the steps suggested by Smith, Flowers and Larkin (2009), then adapted them where I felt the need. I firstly read through the transcripts to familiarize myself with them; I found that at this point I could very clearly see and ‘feel’ the interview itself so I jotted down any thoughts and memories that came to me. I then wrote a ‘sketch’ of my memory of the experience including my own impressions about the participant, and any reflexive thoughts and feelings about myself in relationship with her. The purpose of this was to record the distracting thoughts I had about the overall meeting but that did not necessarily correspond to any of the text. As suggested by Smith, Flowers and Larkin (2009), I found noting down all of this to begin with allowed me to approach the next step with a less cluttered mind.

I then embarked upon what I experienced as the more rigorous analytic process. The first stage of this was to note initial comments in the left hand column, taking care at this stage to remain descriptive and close to the participant’s words. I was cognizant of allowing my notes to emerge

from the data itself, refraining from engaging with thoughts about the other interviews, the wider

literature or the domain of existential philosophy and psychotherapy. The second stage of analysis was to make more interpretative and exploratory comments in the right hand column. This was a detailed line-by-line analysis of the text which engaged the hermeneutic circle in

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moving in and out of the parts and the whole. Though line-by-line, this process was non-linear and iterative in its continuous motion between transcript, initial descriptive notes, and interpretative, psychological comments.

I found these initial stages to be a paradoxical process of both intuitively responding to the data and critically assessing my intuitive responses. In line with Heidegger (1927), I understand my responses as coming from my own being-in-the-world and not only from the data itself. But as I critically reflect upon them I can continually appraise how I might be tempted to morph the data through these responses, and keep this in check. The data is co-constituted through a dialogic encounter, but it is ultimately the participant’s lived experience that I am seeking to illuminate. I strove to keep in mind each participant’s reaction to reading my final research, wanting them to feel that I had accurately given voice and space to each of them and that in seeking to describe this phenomenon I did not disregard the unique nuances of the individual experience.

The third stage was to list the themes that had emerged from these initial analytic stages, clustering them into categories of commonality as well as divergence. After doing this for each individual transcript I created a table of superordinate themes across all ten narratives. This was a process of engaging with the hermeneutic circle in looking at the ‘whole’ of the ten transcripts against the ‘part’ of each one in order to ensure coherency within the final table and to always remain grounded within the data. In this stage of analysis some of the emergent themes of individual transcripts were dropped as I felt it important to ‘evidence’ each theme through the experience and verbatim quotation of at least three participants (Smith, Flowers and Larkin, 2009). However, themes were not dropped merely because they demonstrated variation or contradiction of another theme – one of the strengths of phenomenological research is that it can embrace paradox and divergence. The themes that did not become part of the final table were ones that were not deemed to be ‘essential’ to the experience of being a childfree woman aged 45-55 and I attempted to maintain a focus at all times on answering this specific research question.

The final table of superordinate themes can be found at the beginning of chapter 4 (Table 2). This is refined from my table of emergent themes extracted from the research data which is found in appendix G along with an example of my analytic stages. Keeping a paper trail was crucial to my own process of analysis in order to ensure coherency and rigour throughout initial engagement with the transcription to final writing up of the dissertation. But more than this, I deem it important to allow others to assess how my final claims were arrived at. This is to help keep my research credible and dependable (Guba and Lincoln, 1989) such that my conclusions remain grounded in the original data, and for this to be evident to others. This is not to say that a different researcher would make exactly the same findings if this research was repeated. IPA is fundamentally hermeneutic and interpretative, meaning that the data is understood from the ‘horizon’ of the interpreter which may differ to that of another (Kock, 1993). Furthermore, the data actually produced will be affected by the person of the interviewer, and the resonance or relationship with the interviewee (Etherington, 2004). However, the paper trail as well as my reflexivity and transparency throughout the research process ought to demonstrate clear and descriptive as well as interpretive findings. As Sandelowski (1986) posits, qualitative findings do

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not need to be absolutely replicable, but another researcher should not be able to make contradictory conclusions based upon the same data.

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