What respondents say in interviews and write in documents can be analyzed at least in two different ways: as resource and topic. I approached these data primarily as a resource, that is, as a source of true accounts of social situations (Seale 1998: 209, my emphasis). This approach treats interview data as a resource for discovering aspects outside the interview situation. Many interpreters and feminist social researchers hold a realist epistemological viewpoint that more authentic accounts may be gained in qualitative interviews of a certain format. It involves developing relationships of trust and proximity between researcher and respondents, being flexible in the interview situation and being as open as possible about our own agendas and the purposes of the research (ibid.: 208). By observing/participating in the ‘natural’ setting, while avoiding to become part of it and by using the respondents´ own words, I can show what they do and think (see Walsh 1998: 224; Ryen 2004: 32; Miles and Huberman 1994: 8). I assume that I have gained access to the social reality from the perspective of the activists. The interviews and documents shed a light on their activities, subject positions, and sense-making which they describe as a result of belonging to a civic activism organization. I use their statements to illustrate my conclusions; the quotes are important for the reliability of the study (see Ryen 2004).
This kind of approach is developed in critical research. The interviews are viewed as interactional contexts in which the social worlds of individuals, societies, and historical epochs can be made comprehensible as contextually embedded wholes (Richardson 1995: 201). It is stressed that we do not have direct access to the experiences of the respondents, but rather to their representations of their experiences (Widerberg 1996). We understand the human experience as a narrative. I interpreted and understood the activists’ experiences through their personal or “biographic stories” and their “collective story” (Richardson 1995). The collective story of mothers-activists was constructed in the interviews and documents in opposition to the hegemonic “cultural story” (ibid.; Kincheloe and McLaren 2005). The cultural story is produced in the arena of military draft politics from the hegemonic perspective of the dominant actors including trans- /national elites, groups of men, and others.
Further, I integrated my approach to the data as a resource by treating it as a topic. The accounts of the interviewees or their documents can be viewed as the linguistic
repertoire, on which they draw. Certain words, phrases, and ideas which are typical of certain popular discourses are used to achieve certain effects (Seale 1998: 212). Interview data cannot be read as a literal description of social action (Denzin and Lincoln 2005; Miles and Huberman 1994: 9). The interviews include a crucial discrepancy between the descriptive and interpretative dimensions of a conversation (Kvale 1996: 32). The data reveal the interpretative practices of respondents which occur in relation to the specific interactional and discursive occasion (Seale 1998: 213). In addition, the respondents construct their accounts in relation to multiple and changing social realities. For example, during the interviews, the respondents presented different explanations of the issue at different times. Sometimes they used “impression management” to construct self- identities which reflected how they wanted others, including the researcher, to see them. An additional example is the shift in the collective self-representation in the documents. In the early 2000s, the SOMO shifted from using the language of “defenders of human rights” to applying the terms of “women’s movement.”
As explained above, the interview and documentary data in my study have the analytic status of resource and topic. I explain that by the complexity of the social reality, in which humans are both positioned within institutions and producing/changing them. In the narratives, the respondents partly reflect their social positioning through gender, nationality, socio-economic status, education and partly challenge and change it. The respondents´ interpretations of the events and their interactions are influenced by the social conditions. The memories and experiences which the respondents activate in the interviews are selective. The choice of the themes and experiences upon which they touch tells something about their positions and the collective experiences and beliefs that dominate in the sphere of the NGOs in Russia. In the analyses I consider 1) what the activists say, 2) how they say it (linguistic repertoire) and 3) how they stage interactions with others.
Connected with the analytical status of the data is the question of the possibility to make generalizations. The purpose of qualitative studies is not to generalize from the sample to the population. An interpretative (narrative) explanation and understanding is produced by relating individual and group stories to the larger social contexts (Richardson 1995). Further, a researcher looks for concepts and models which account for the empirical findings. Theories and hypotheses in a qualitative study are not ‘tested,’ but
‘generated’ by systematically comparing the data with existing theory and relevant empirical studies.
To produce and critically develop concepts and models through interaction between data and existing theories is a way to create “analytic generalization” (Miles and Huberman 1994: 28; Yin 2009). The described actions and interpreted meanings can be explained in a more abstract way. For example, I constructed the concepts “maternal activist,” “courage” in the NGO sphere, and others. While these explanations may be considered “internally” valid, they may gain added explanatory strength if they are connected to theoretical models outside the actual empirical study (Miles and Huberman 1994: 279). In my study, actions described and categorized in terms of “maternal activist” may be viewed as “framing” or “reframing” of the social reality by social movements. Furthermore, I suggested a framework for understanding reframing adapted to the context of post-Soviet society. The findings suggest that the theoretical construct of reframing may be developed. This development involved comparing, translating and synthesizing studies of similar phenomena in contemporary Russia, other post-communist countries, and in the transnational arena.
In the following part of this section, I describe the strategies and procedures of the two kinds of analysis of the case study: coding and categorization of the interview transcriptions and activists’ documents and discourse analysis of the press articles.