Description of method: interpretation of data

Analysis of data has followed a hermeneutic approach (Principles 5 and 6), with an emphasis on narrative (Principle 2), paying particular attention to themes arising from an Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition as transmitted by MacIntyre. A conscious effort has been made to maintain a process of building successive hermeneutic circles through which the understanding of the researcher evolves. Hermeneutic

conversations have been conducted between researcher and text (the record of interviews) as well as between researcher and academic literature. This leads to a complex set of interrelated natural and hermeneutic conversations being conducted to some degree simultaneously and to some degree in sequence, as illustrated below.

Figure 3: Interwoven conversations

This diagram visualises a sequence of interpretive events. The researcher conducted the first natural conversation in January 2013; R1 designates the researcher at the time of this meeting, and P1, Participant 1, his interlocutor. This interview was a genuine conversation in Gadamer’s sense of that phrase and constituted a distinct hermeneutic circle. The conversation was recorded and later transcribed, resulting in the first transcript, T1. The act of transcription was itself also an act of interpretation and likewise constituted a further hermeneutic circle.

Immediately following completion of the transcript, and before moving onto another

R1 T1

P2 R

T2 P1 R2

L: Literature

L

R: Researcher P: Participant T: Transcript

approximately the same length as the transcript itself. This act of interpretation, shown as a loop between R and T1, was in Gadamer’s terms a hermeneutic conversation, and constituted a further hermeneutic circle. These two documents, transcript and commentary, then formed a linked pair, which were maintained as the basis for further acts of interpretation. In the meantime, further conversations were conducted,

transcribed, interpreted to a commentary, and so on. These are shown on the diagram as R2 (the researcher at the time of the second interview in February 2013), holding a conversation with P2 (the second participant), the transcript T2 being made and a second commentary being written. A further eight conversations were held and interpreted in the same way, not shown on this diagram. At the same time, before during and after these cycles of interpretation related to primary data, the researcher was conducting hermeneutic conversations with the academic literature. This is shown as a loop on the diagram between the researcher R and the literature L. This loop should be envisaged as representing an indeterminate series of turns of the hermeneutic circle as the researcher read successive articles and books.

The diagram is thus a simplified visual representation of a complex process in which a number of natural and hermeneutic conversations were conducted. These

conversations were in each instance turns of the hermeneutic circle, and were unified by the person of the researcher, who was engaged in an ongoing process of

understanding. Crucial to this process in terms of Gadamer’s thinking is the realisation that the researcher’s perspective is never stationary. Each time that a turn of the hermeneutic circle commences, the researcher engages in an act of interpretation which is determined by his prejudgements at that time. When that act of interpretation is complete (albeit provisionally) the researcher’s prejudgements have been adjusted, so that when the next turn of the circle commences this new act of interpretation is determined by a new set of prejudgements. Another way to express this is to say that as each circle is complete, some fusion of horizons will have occurred, such that the researcher’s horizon has shifted before the next conversation is encountered.

Narration and analysis

The overall mode of analysis here is hermeneutic and interpretive. In fact ‘analysis’ is itself arguably a misleading term in this context; what is not being undertaken in this research is analysis in the root sense of breaking down into component parts. It would be better to characterise the process as successive acts of interpretation from one kind of language into another, or from one set of narratives to another. The transcripts of conversations which form the primary data set do not consist only of narratives (they also contain questions, speculative theories, affirmations, rebuttals and so on), but

narratives are of primary interest, and a fusion of those narratives will result in an overarching narrative to be produced by the researcher.

To what extent is it helpful to describe this undertaking as ‘narrative research’? It clearly is narrative research insomuch as it elicits stories through interviews and then interprets those stories through a narrative built up by the researcher, and there are various texts (Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou,2008; Elliott, 2005) which offer helpful advice about the rationale for and techniques of narrative research in social science.

However, such authors also make clear that narrative enquiry is very heterogeneous and not particularly rule bound. Even then, their assumptions are not necessarily the assumptions of this research. So for instance Elliott (2005) distinguishes between first-order narratives, which describe the first hand lived experience of research

participants, and second-order narratives produced by the researcher which make sense of other people’s accounts and the social world. The current research project, however, recognises participants as second-order narrators in this sense, because it recognises them as moral philosophers. So the participants in this research might embark on first-order narratives with a phrase such as ‘My first job was in a branch of X Bank in Dunfermline…’; or equally they might embark on second-order narratives with a phrase such as ‘The problem with banking these days…’ Both are equally valuable sources of data.

Perhaps the most helpful way to characterise this research, then, is as narrative enquiry in a MacIntyrean mode, and to rely on the six principles of enquiry already articulated, together with MacIntyre’s writings more widely to guide the way that the research approaches the stories being told. For example, the emphasis on genuine conversation which is central to this research method implies that the researcher takes seriously the intended meaning of each participant, as far as this can be ascertained.

Ostensible meanings conveyed through stories are therefore of primary interest. This is not to say that hidden or unintended meanings are not of interest or factors such as narrative structure, genre or context, but they are of interest principally in

understanding this or that particular person’s point of view. The first question is, ‘What is this person trying to say in this story?’ rather than, ‘What is this person

unintentionally revealing about themselves?’ The same principle guides another aspect of this narrative approach, which is that the research aims to articulate narratives as presented by this group, rather than to critique their narratives against some other, external sources which might offer alternative narratives of the same events.

Coding or indexing

The point of caution above about the word ‘analysis’ applies also to the idea of thematic analysis and coding. Analysis here cannot mean the breaking down of text into component parts, since it is vital that the texts retain their narrative and

conversational unity and context; either a broken-up story is no longer a story, or it is a different story. For similar reasons, the term ‘coding’ needs to be treated with caution, since some methods of coding text imply that sections of text are categorised, and potentially reordered (Bryman, 2008). So ‘coding’ has been used in this research in the process of interpreting primary data, but only in the sense of indexing, without categorising, breaking up or re-ordering sections of text. This process of indexing supports the hermeneutic sequencing of successive interpretations, allowing the researcher to track themes or topics through successive stages of the development of his own ‘second-order’ narratives and to demonstrate that those themes remain rooted in the original stories told by the research participants.

Examples of the coding process are shown at Appendix 2. The appendix shows how transcripts were coded using a simple tabular format in a word processing programme.

This process was flexible, allowing for a number of adaptations of coding patterns.

Indexing in this way was used as a means of recording interpretation and retrieving data for the presentation of findings in Chapters 4 and 5 of this thesis. The appendix also shows a coding diagram which illustrates how coding was being grouped during analysis. However, this process was treated flexibly at all times, and there was no attempt to have interpretation follow coding. Rather, coding followed interpretation, and then acted as a flexible aide-memoire during further iterations of interpretation.