This study is constructed on combined qualitative methods; thus, the analysis process follows the same path. In line with the primary concern of this project, the process of personal empowerment is explored by studying different indicators of personal
empowerment. Personal empowerment or psychological empowerment is an individual process that is established on psychological theories. Due to the nature of this project—
a mixture of PAR with gender factors highlighted—to evaluate and measure a potential empowerment process, the frameworks of women’s empowerment used through the application of community development studies. In the analysis process, the women empowerment indicators introduced by Naila Kabeer (1999) were most influential.
Kabeer (2001) defines the concept of power as an ‘ability to exercise choice’, and
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introduces three groups of indicators for measuring the empowerment process. These three interrelated dimensions are:
• resources, which form the conditions under which choices are made
• agency, which is at the heart of the process by which choices are made
• achievements, which are the outcomes of choices (Kabeer, 2001, p. 19).
According to Kabeer (2001), resources also can be found in different categories:
material, social or human. In the context of this study, which is not a developing country, the emphasis is placed on the social and human indicators of the resource. For a straightforward adaptation of an immigrant in the host society, the levels of social connections and human assets are vital. In this study, the participant’s social
relationships—as one of the socio-demographic positions—are reviewed in three categories:
• social bond—within their community
• social bridge—with other communities, especially mainstream Australians
• social links—in this research, the position of all sorts of mass media, including social media, and also the participants’ relation with those types of media.
In the human resource section, this study has an overview of the PVPW participants’
employment and education. In addition, barriers and enablers in the empowerment process of the participants and their adaptation to the host society have been reviewed.
The role of language and cultural barriers and other sub-indicators such as level of cultural shock, sense of belonging and motivation for change are discussed. In this process, a short questionnaire (see Appendix C) was helpful. Further information was extracted from interviews.
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In analysing the process of evaluating, the formation of the agency by the participants in the PVPW was also significant. Kabeer (2001) defines agency as indicators of
empowerment:
Agency is about more than observable action; it also encompasses the meaning, motivation and purpose, which individuals bring to their activity, their sense of agency, or the power within (Kabeer, 2001, p. 21).
To evaluate the level of agency formation in the participants during the process of the PVPW, all the gathered information, including questionnaires, interviews, observational notes and researcher reflective diary, was coded to find the related themes to women empowerment indicators in the Kabeer framework.
Coding
The data gathered from video interviews, a short questionnaire and researcher observation and reflexive journal were utilised. The interviews were transcribed in a
‘word for word’ or semi-verbatim form in preparation for coding. Poland (1995) defines verbatim transcription as the word for word reproduction of verbal data, where the written words are an exact replication of the recorded video or audio words. However, as the participants were second-language English speakers, sometimes they lost a word or used the wrong tense. At those times, the correct word was added in square brackets to clarify meaning.
In the first stage of analysis, the video interviews were watched and listened to several times, and then transcribed. To understand the content and complexity of the
participant’s dialogue, an interpretative analysis of the transcripts was employed ‘to explore in detail how participants are making sense of their personal experience’ (Smith
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& Osborn, 2004, p. 95). The interview transcripts were read and re-read to identify the themes that aligned with empowerment theory and indicators. When the transcripts were first read, some notes and codes were elaborated in the margins of the text about any responses or phrases that were of interest or significantly related to the research questions. As a result, it became possible to build some preliminary connections between the personal empowerment self-declaration aspects within the narratives of participants. It is important to note that at the individual level, the cognitive concept of
‘self’ is important. Oyserman et al. (2012, p. 71) describe the self as a term that:
refers to a warm sense or a warm feeling that something is ‘about me’ or ‘about us’. Reflecting on oneself is both a common activity and a mental feat. It requires that there is an ‘I’ that can consider an object that is ‘me’. The term
‘self’ includes both the actor who thinks, ‘I am thinking’ and the object of thinking, ‘about me’.
After establishing the importance of self and the combinations of terms with self as a prefix, the transcribed interviews were searched for varieties of cognitive self-concepts.
The words were highlighted and put together to determine the patterns of agency formation during the process of PVPW by the participants. In general term, self-conception refers to individuals’ knowledge and perceptions about themselves;
specifically, it is our attitudes, feelings and knowledge about our abilities, skills, appearance and social acceptability (Byrne, 1984, p. 429). Enhancing the self-concept and constructing agency is one of the capabilities by which the process of empowerment occurs. Psychological empowerment is the main purpose of this study, and the related capabilities of self-esteem, confidence, self-efficacy and an ability to imagine and aspire to a better future, mean ‘individuals expand their freedom of choice and action to shape
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their life’ (Narayan, 2005a, p. 4-10). Agency in the process of empowerment is defined as ‘the ability to define one’s goals and act upon them’ (Kabeer, 2001, p. 21). The sense of agency or ‘power within’ is defined as the ability of an individual in decision-making (Kabeer, 1999), and whatever an individual freely pursues; that is, goals that are
important to them (Sen, 1985). These definitions point to the importance of an individual’s human psychological capabilities. Samman and Santos (2009, p 3-8) observe that agency can also be exercised in different spheres, domains and at levels. It means there is a different agency sense forming in every situation, in every individual.
As the self-concept includes a variety of ‘selves’, the meaning of each self-ability differs. For clarity in this analysis, I use the following definitions:
• self-esteem: ‘an individual’s subjective evaluation of his or her worth as a person’ (Orth & Robins, 2014, p. 381).
• self-efficacy: ‘people’s beliefs in their capabilities to produce desired effects by their own actions’ (Bandura, 1997, p. vii).
• confidence: a common term that refers to the strength of belief but does not necessarily specify what the certainty is about (Bandura, 1977).
Put simply, self-esteem is how you feel about yourself overall, and self-confidence is how you think about your abilities and can vary from situation to situation. In the case of this study, the focus is mostly on the formation of self-efficacy and confidence. Since the empowerment phenomenon ‘can be assessed through its action or its results’
(Narayan, 2005a, p.15), measures have to be found indirectly through underlying substitutions, which in the case of this study, are individuals. Consequently,
self-concept and self-efficacy beliefs have explicit value in reference to a person’s important abilities, behaviours and characteristics (Bauer & Bonanno, 2001, p. 426). It is
important to note that in the current study, the PVPW participants were not asked to explain their ‘self’ or ‘empowerment process’ specifically; instead, they were
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encouraged to speak freely, explain their background and describe their experiences to date during interviews. As a result, the interviews are narratives of the participants’
personalities, backgrounds, desires, emotions and goals. As Oyserman et al. (2012, p.
69) declare, a person uses the ‘self’ when they know themselves, and this feeling leads them ‘to make sense and make choices, using the self as an important perceptual, motivational and self-regulatory tool’.
Following a quick search, it was found that the words ‘my’ and ‘I’ and their combinations were used by the participants in their interviews around 1,000 times within a total of 9,700 words—a pattern that illustrates how they think and believes in themselves. In their interviews, the participants also used ‘self’ in combination with
‘my’, showing how strongly they think about themselves. However, there are many other combinations of ‘my’, and ‘I’ used by participants, which are illustrated in Table 1. The importance of understanding those combined words is that they suggest ‘self’ is
‘a collection of abilities, temperament, goals, values, and preferences that distinguish one individual from another’ (Tesser, 2002, p. 185).
The indicator of ‘self’ leads the study to look closer at the meaning of ‘self’ and its dynamic nature, and compare participants’ self-evaluation in the first and last
interviews. The participants mostly used the word ‘I’ and its combinations, such as ‘I do/did’, ‘I want’, ‘I can/could’ and ‘I had/have’ approximately 350 times. As Maddux (2009, p. 336) clarifies, self-efficacy belief ‘is what I believe I can do with my skills under certain conditions’ and is naturally concerned with what ‘I believe I can do’.
Thus, the ‘I’ and its combination words are important in this study to determine participants’ self-efficacy beliefs. A self-efficacy believer can perform the behaviour that produces the outcomes of believing in personal ability, such as ‘I can do it’, ‘I will
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do it’ or ‘I want to do it’. Notably, five of the six participants used these powerful words and explanations during their last interviews, which showed strong self-efficacy. For instance:
Table 1- The participant’s combination use of the pronoun ‘my’
• I can do something by myself.
• I can plan something to empower women through video.
• … but now, I can even judge.
• I can even tell the world what is going on [in] my area.
• I can do anything.
• Whenever I go somewhere nice and see something interesting, I feel that I can do the same thing [video recording].
• … but now I know that even I can create something and give some news to people.
• It’s not [too] late. I can do it.
• I can be a citizen journalist take a photo or do something, or maybe tell that message to other people.
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The manual application of a priori codes (Stemler, 2001) to the participant’s interview transcriptions was very effective in finding the themes related to empowerment theory and its indicators. To apply the a priori coding style, also known as the template coding system (King, 1998), in the current study, the codes were defined within the
self-concept domain as explained above. Further, a manual coding system was used to allow more ‘focus on the meaning’ (Charmaz & Belgrave, 2007 , p. 510) in the analysis and will enable the researcher to exercise reflexivity in the coding process.
After coding the participants’ interview transcripts, the codes were categorised and themes shaped, which are discussed in the next three chapters.
Chapter summary
Various data gathering methods were employed during the process of the PVPW to ensure consistent and reliable results, including observation, video recording, semi-structured interviews, a brief questionnaire and researcher reflection diary. This study is based on participatory qualitative research and inspired by PV projects for community development undertaken by media practitioners. The PVPW sessions were designed to incorporate media literacy education and hands-on video production training. The PVPW was conducted in four sessions during June and July 2014, and four informal sessions for editing the participants’ final projects. The PVPW participants were video interviewed individually in the first session, and again four weeks after completing their video projects in August 2014. The participants completed a questionnaire in the first session of the PVPW to assist in gathering individual socio-demographic information.
The video interviews with participants were transcribed and coded according to the
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empowerment framework. At this stage of the analysis process, the researcher reflective diary, participant’s answers to the questionnaire, and recorded video logs of the PVPW were utilised.
One of the significant highlights in this study was the complicated dynamics of working with human subjects in a cross-cultural context. The sensibility of ethically handling human emotions was essential issue. The participants were purposefully helped to develop the technical skills necessary for creating video segments; however, not all of them ended up being video producers in their everyday lives. Interestingly, the
participants in the PVPW used their active involvement in this creative workshop as an engine to start their journey of discovery, which resulted in their increased self-efficacy beliefs and set up their future goals. In the following chapters, this journey will be discussed in depth.
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The previous chapters outlined the scope of this study, a literature review around the research context and methodology. This chapter is my written reflections on the process of making the video documentation of the process of the PVPW—the video report on the study—titled, Looking for the Phoenix Within. This video documentation is the second component of this study. Since Nisbet and Aufderheide (2009, p. 451)
emphasise how crucial it is for filmmakers to ‘perceive their own actions and choices and the motivations behind them’, I define myself in this study and in relation to the video documentation, as a facilitator-researcher-video producer. The following sections are my reflections and critical overview of this triumvirate responsibility.
When I started the project, I could not imagine the difficulty of combining the positions of filmmaker and academic researcher. Clearly, for any video documentary, a filmmaker needs proper research around the subject of the film. However, combining filmmaking and academic research on a topic is not easy. This study was structured and designed to observe, review and analyse the effects of the PVPW on the empowerment process of its participants. Video documentation of the PVPW process was primarily to help me in the observations and then in creating a visual document that everybody could
understand—especially those who may decide to use a similar framework for working with immigrants—as an encouragement tool for adaptations of immigrants in their society. However, when I started the PVPW, I found I was not occupying two positions;
in reality, it was a triumvirate role of facilitator-researcher-video producer. The
complexity of these positions led me to question whether I could achieve all aspect and goals of my study.