Data Collection Methods

The following qualitative primary data collection methods have been used in the main study phase: casual conversations, semi-structured interviews, and personal narrative. According to Henderson and Hickerson (2007), feminist leisure research advocates the use of semi-structured and in-depth interviews to study women and leisure, while the broad field of leisure studies utilises mixed methods and quantitative questionnaires. As this study focuses on the subjective meanings women attach to their work and leisure, methods such as interviews and conversations have been applied to grasp these meanings. Moreover, the epistemological stance of the inquiry embraces a reflective and authoethnographic approach (Fonow and Cook, 1991) to be adopted in order to account for the researcher‘s inherent socio-cultural assumptions about women and leisure in Bulgaria). Appendix 4 provides a detailed account of the appropriateness of the selected methods vis-à-vis the study sub-problems. In this section, the selected methods are reviewed and a justification for their use is provided.

Before reaching a final decision to employ only the above-mentioned data-gathering techniques the researcher considered other qualitative methods, like observations, focus groups, documents and visual materials (Holliday, 2002; Robson, 2011). Through observation, the researcher monitors the actions and behaviours of people and describes

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and interprets what he/she sees. This approach is particularly useful in complementing other qualitative techniques because of its directness (Robson, 2011) and when observations are conducted in a small group for a small project as they take up a lot of time and ‗immersion‘.

However, In view of the focus of this research study observations as a method of investigation is rejected by the investigator because the person‘s experiences (which depend on various subjective and social factors) cannot be simply observed. Subjective experience can be recorder and observed; however, the value-free characteristic of the method itself is of little use for the present investigation, which focuses on subjective interpretations and meanings. The reasons for rejecting participant observations as a method of empirical data collection are further discussed in Chapter 4: Conduct of Fieldwork, section 4.2.2.

Focus groups or ‗group interviews‘ consist of groups of people discussing a particular issue (Edmiston, 1944). However, focus groups were also rejected as a method of data collection because the interaction and dynamics between the participants in the discussion are not the focus of the thesis and the number of questions for discussion is also limited. Additionally, the researcher lacks the experience to facilitate an effective uncompromised discussion.

Finally, as the study‘s ultimate aim is to give individual participants voice in the study, without prioritising one individual‘s voice over another, with focus groups there is always a danger of one or more persons dominating the discussion, which would not be appropriate for this type of study (Robson, 2011).

Documents and audio-visual materials are also used in qualitative research, but specific materials dealing with Sofian women‘s leisure choices simply may not exist, either in Bulgarian or in English. As, explained in the introduction, some Bulgarian feminist scholars have done work on describing the historical traditions constraining women‘s everyday lives and identities, but women‘s leisure, and leisure as resistance in particular, as a focus of research, is a new theme that has not been previously explored. Moreover, it is also highly likely that any such documents would present an androcentric view of the phenomenon under investigation in accordance with the historical patriarchal tradition. So, as a result of

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these considerations, the following methods were used to gain insight into participant‘s lives and experiences.

Casual conversations

In contrast to common misconceptions about casual conversations being unimportant and trivial, sometimes pointless, sociolinguists like Eggins and Slade (1997:6) argue that casual conversations are, in fact: ‗highly structured, functionally motivated, semantic activity‘. They define them as: ‗talk that is not motivated by any clear pragmatic purpose.‘ (Eggins and Slade, 1997:19). Linguistic anthropologies Duranti (1997:250) equates ‗conversational interactions‘ with ‗everyday talk‘ and ‗mundane exchanges‘, and distinguishes these from interviews, debates, press conferences, trials, religious ceremonies. Casual conversation analysis is recognised by feminist scholars as a technique that enables storytelling and/or personal narrative (Chase, 2011) and identifies the individuals participating in the communication – the storytellers in a particular physical or communicative space.

Furthermore, this type of analysis is particularly useful in feminist research studies, as it usually involves either all or some of the following aspects, identified by Gaudio (2003:662):

‗(i) the speech situation including participants‘ reasons for engaging in conversation and the nonverbal activities that accompany their talk; (ii) participants‘ social identities and pre-existing relationships; (iii) participants‘ geographical location; and (iv) the temporal boundaries that mark conversational beginnings and ends‘. The aim of this analysis is to showcase how the material practice of the conversation and women‘s understandings of the the political, economic, and ideological hierarchies (Gaudio, 2003) inform the social life in the contemporary Sofian society and consequently their leisure meanings.

The rationale for using casual conversation is firstly, to develop a good rapport with the respondents and secondly, to create a mutual sustainable relationship with them, before and during the research. In some cases where the participants are the researcher‘s friends such rapport was already established. In addition, the researcher has chosen to use casual

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conversations for personal reasons. As a fieldworker, as a feminist researcher, and as a friend, the researcher is familiar with engaging in casual conversations with some of the participants and considers the communication a prospective source of information and way to access their personal everyday lives and ‗hear their voice‘. As Fonow and Cook (1991:11) claim, such linguistic practices ‗reveal the cultural norms and assumptions governing gender relations‘. The justification for using casual conversations in this research project is further reinforced in Appendix 5, where the advantages and disadvantages of the method are also discussed.

Semi-structured interviews

Interviewing as a research practice typically involves the researcher asking questions and receiving answers from the interviewees (Robson, 2011). Mason (2002:62–63) defines it as:

‗Interactional exchange of dialogue, relatively informal style, thematic/topic cantered biographical/narrative approach, co-production of knowledge involving researcher and interviewee.‘ Oakley (1981) is among the first feminists to problematise some textbook definitions of interviewing as a one-sided process, in which the researcher is a passive inquirer, who does not gives out information, only requires it. So, one-on-one semi-structured interviews, in which the interviewees have the opportunity to ask questions back, is deemed appropriate for the purpose of the study, as it allows freedom of communication and permits a more flexible line of enquiry. In qualitative research, the types and styles of interviews are generally fully-structured, semi-structured and unstructured (Mason, 2002; Robson, 2011).

The value of semi-structured interviews for this feminist research study is in the production of thick description of the study problem (Geertz, 1993).

The rationale for using semi-structured interviews in this case study is to generate knowledge about the duality (personally and socially bound) of women‘s leisure experiences in relation to the Bulgarian socio-culture. Furthermore, the epistemological and ontological positions of this project are a further justification of the preferred data collection method, as interviews

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are appropriate when the purpose of the study is to explore, describe and understand the complexity of leisure and work meanings, through facilitating descriptions of women‘s lived experiences (Robson, 2011). Appendix 6 accounts for the advantages, disadvantages and the solutions to the disadvantages of semi-structured interviews.

Authoethnography: self-narrative/ personal narrative

As already mentioned in section 3.1, authoethnography as a method is both a process and a product, the goal of which is to fully acknowledge and develop the highly subjective experience as an intrinsic part of the research (Anderson, 2004, 2006; Denzin 2014), thus becoming a basis for scientific accountability (Holliday, 2002). In this study, the feminist researcher incorporates personal, reflexive aspects into research to shed light on how domination and power relations are reproduced in everyday life (Allen, 2000; Allen and Piercy, 2005).

The justification for using authoethnography streams from the fact that it assists the production of meaningful, evocative research grounded in personal experience in relation to a specific cultural identity (Ellis et al., 2011). In this study, the researcher‘s personal narrative is integrated in the thesis to reflect the physical presence in the setting and her own leisure identity creation in order to complement the findings of the research effort. Another merit of this method is the forthright visibility of the researcher, which facilitates greater understanding and transparency of the chosen methodology and strategy of the research process (Anderson and Austin, 2012).

This approach and its proponents are often criticised for being too personal, too sentimental, too political and too theoretical (Adams and Holman Jones, 2008). They are, also, panned for being too self-indulgent and even narcissistic (Coffey, 1999). Moreover, authoethnographic writing faced the difficult task of ‗proving‘ its rigour and legitimacy (Holt, 2008), as the traditional evaluation criteria do not apply to this type of research (Ellis and Bochner, 2000).

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It seems that the first criticism is made by scholars who lack the necessary knowledge of the authoethnographic methodologies and its forms of representation (Holt, 2008). It is a result of misapprehensions of the genre due to a mistrust of the work of self (Sparkes, 2002). Ellis and Bochner (2000) attribute the accusations of narcissism and self-indulgence as a way to reinforce ethnographic orthodoxy and resist change. Thus, such disapproval of the authoethnographic approach functions exactly as the type of canonical orthodoxy the methodology seeks to challenge (Holt, 2008). Therefore, authoethnography is the optimal choice for this thesis because, as Tierney (1998:66) asserts, ‗authoethnography confronts dominant forms of representation and power in an attempt to reclaim, through self-reflective response, representational spaces that have marginalied those of us at the borders‘.

In terms of the second criticism, my opinion coincides with Bochner‘s (2000:268) view that:

‗no single, unchallenged paradigm has been established for deciding what does and does not comprise valid, useful, and significant knowledge‘. Thus, I suggest that the ‗value‘ of researcher‘s personal narrative should be judged in terms of whether or not the work evokes an emotional and intellectual response in its audience (Richardson, 1995, 2000). The tensions and difficulties the researcher had to overcome (pre, during and post research) are presented in Chapter 5: Researcher‘s Reflexivity and Authoethnographic accounts.

Finally, as in this study the data is collected through different qualitative methods and it is analysed and interpreted by the investigator herself, it is important to provide an example of its origin and type. Thus, ways in which the data is interpreted in relation to the socio-cultural context are exemplified (Holliday, 2002) Some data types may overlap, as bits of talk can also be seen as description of behaviour or account of events by participants. Appendix 7 provides a catalogue of types of qualitative data and their characteristics. It contains two broad categories: what the researcher describes (a–c) and what the participants say (d–e).

The category (f) includes the researcher‘s encounters and presence in the setting. In this study, these categories are equally epistemologically valuable.

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