Most of the interviews were digitally recorded; only two were not, due to technical difficulties. In these two cases, I took dense notes and reconstructed the interviews immediately afterward. Before conducting the interview, I used the “informed consent”
form to reassure my respondents that their names would only be mentioned if they allowed me to do so. I had initially requested an exemption from the Internal Review Board not to obtain signatures on the informed consent form. While that strategy was wise and contributed to building further trust between the respondents and me, I was surprised to see my respondents’ openness to my mentioning of their names in the study.
Although many of these women were public figure, I detected that they felt a sense of ownership and pride of their accomplishment and positions on issues. Some of them insisted that I do indeed attribute their quotes to them by name. In my interview with Dr.
Ugarit Younan, a Maronite who is one of the leaders of the Movement for People’s Rights, her response to my willingness to protect her confidentiality was:
You are interviewing me. I don’t have a problem with using my name. I prefer that you say my name. When you send me the papers later, if I have a problem, this is a study, when I see it I will tell you to add something or remove another. If I had a problem with the interview, I would not have done it. That is, I would not do the interview without mentioning my name. On the contrary, that’s it. It is one
decision and this way, you mention my name because it is more appropriate to do so.
I completed the transcription after I returned to the United States. Within six month after returning from the field, I transcribed all of the English interviews and the focus group, which had been conducted in English. The other interviews and observations were transcribed in their original language with the help of two research assistants. One assistant was an affiliate with the American University of Beirut and the other with the Notre Dame University. Both assistants signed a contract abiding by the confidentiality guidelines which I provided. The interviews transcribed by the assistant from AUB were then stored on a password secured webspace to which she and I only had access. The interviews transcribed at Notre Dame were safely stored using a controlled blackboard page. Additionally, I reviewed each transcribed interview to ensure its accuracy.
Listening to the interviews and reading the transcribed words proved beneficial in my analysis of their contents.
My translation into English of important quotes was oriented towards capturing the meaning of the idea rather than literal translation. However, I sought to strike a balance between the readers’ comprehension and the integrity of the interviews. I applied
“cultural translation” (Clifford and Marcus 1986), where I attempted not only to translate the words of my respondents into English, but also to transpose their experiences,
environments and cultures. It is noteworthy that translation was a major task in this work as my fluency in Arabic is limited to the daily conversation terminologies. I had to learn
not only the translation of terms such as empowerment or workshops but also the most appropriate synonym to use in my respondents’ scholarly and professional circles.
In addition to my recorded and published data, I relied on the notes and thoughts that I jotted down either in my journal, in which I wrote daily, or in my notepad, which I took with me to each interview. I used rich descriptions in my field notes to convey my findings and I kept notes that clarified my feelings and thoughts after each
observation/interview (Emerson et al. 1995; Esterberg 2002). I recorded occurrences of positive as well as negative activities in my observations, taking into account my preconceived ideas and assumptions. I also expanded points of contact with my
respondents and communicated in the language that they were most comfortable using.
Although my analysis of data was ongoing, I see it as falling into four distinctive stages.
Through all four of these stages, I mostly used inductive reasoning and open coding.
Prior to going into the field, I started out with a research question and a specified direction for my research. My interest centered on two main themes and their links:
women’s activism and kinship. Although these two concepts were the focus of my study, I broadened my analysis and used open coding as “a way of opening up avenues of inquiry” because I wanted to “discover” theory as it emerged in my fieldnotes and other data (Emerson et al. 1995: 143). I did so by asking theoretically relevant questions about the dimensions and conditions of women’s struggle for rights and recognition within the kinship structure. The consequences of this relation as it developed in my notes informed my orienting questions, such as who, when, what, how and why.
The first stage of analysis took place while I did my fieldwork in Lebanon. I proceeded inductively by “writing fieldnotes that reflect the significance of events and experience to those in the setting” (Emerson et al. 1995: 151). Either during or after the interviews or the observation, I jotted down notes. Sometimes in my casual conversation with
colleagues and other people, I was given some insight or some information about my subjects, so I also took quick notes to capture my thoughts at that moment. As soon as I got an opportunity to add some depth to these quick notes, I did so immediately, whether while waiting for another respondent or riding the taxi to the next interview or sitting in my office at AUB or in my residence. I used my conversations with others to deepen my interpretative ability by not totally relying on interviews and observations. These
conversations enabled me to learn more about my respondents’ kinship structures and social environments.
Second, while transcribing the interviews or listening to those transcribed by my two assistants, I kept a file of notes. In these notes, I documented reoccurring themes and categories that were prevalent in several interviews or new ideas that were noteworthy. In reading the interviews, along with my notes, I wrote notes and made reference to a
particular quote or passage.
The third stage of my data analysis was looking at the large picture. This stage was challenging because my data varied widely on many levels. I decided to sort the activists into two major categories: those who use the kinship system and those who do not.
Strauss and Corbin (1998: 113) stress that “Grouping concepts into categories is
important because it enables the analyst to reduce the number of units with which he or she is working.” By allocating the data into its appropriate slot using my categories, the larger picture became clearer in relationship to my research problem and my theory. I used ATLAS.ti qualitative software to organize and evaluate the textual data and interviews by identifying common patterns, themes, and concepts. First, I read all the interviews one additional time. In this reading, I identified important quotes and immediately labeled them according to whatever key concepts I saw applicable, which meant many of them were labeled multiple times. This in itself suggested patterns relating to my central categories.
All throughout my research, I try to specify concepts and their relationships to theory and data. I labeled the reoccurring phenomena with concepts that are familiar in the field such as: network, autonomy, kin groups, etc. While reading the interview transcripts I wrote down additional memos to record my assessment of the situation that was captured in the interviews. After reading all the interviews, I read the quotes I had previously identified and organized the labels under groups and subgroups which were to be later transformed into codes. I used the memos that I wrote at this stage to provide description matching each category and code. These notes also served to chart my thought process going through my note taking from the field compared to during transcription. Using my notes, I was able to engage in deep and more meaningful exchange with the opinions and attitudes expressed by my respondents during their interviews. Thus, the third stage is a kind of dialogue between my thoughts as a researcher and the quotes I extracted from the
interviews to represent the activists. Through writing notes, identifying emerging concepts and patterns and grouping them, I applied open coding analysis that scanned entire documents, but also focused on specific words and sentences to compare the experiences of those who did utilize the kinship system versus those who did not.
The final stage of my analysis was the refinement process that occurred during the writing of my dissertation. At this stage, I was able to see yet a bigger picture still that encompassed all my thoughts on paper and the quotes that I chose to include in a grand pattern. As I wrote and revised each chapter, and reread the transcripts again, I dug deeper into my findings and was able to better evaluate my preconceived biases and make sure that they did not impinge upon the meanings of the respondents in my base of
quotes.
Richardson (1990) describes ethnography as a “narrating” act, one which, according to Emerson et al., involves the translation of concepts, telling structured stories that are tied to one or more themes or claims, and textualizing field material, which, from another point of view, is transforming respondents’ experience itself into text. Geertz (1973) refers to this process as “a negotiation” between researchers and the respondents. I tried to narrate, contextualize and transform the stories of Lebanese women’s rights activists using their own words and descriptions as they occurred in my interviews. However I also brought this oral material into relationship with what I noted in my fieldnotes, my observation and my analysis. The crux of these negotiating processes, for me, was considering my respondents’ perceptions and meanings while maintaining my role as a
researcher and whatever distance the latter required in order to be able to analyze their stories and experiences in light of my research question. Objectivity, in reflexivity is “not measured by procedures that assure an accurate mapping of the world but by the growth of knowledge; that is, the imaginative and parsimonious reconstruction of theory to accommodate anomalies”(Burawoy 1998: 5). Adhering to this principle of objectivity-as-growth-of-knowledge was a process that was developed and reconstructed at each of the four stages of analysis.