Engaging Multiple Methods

In Chapter Two, I presented the process of becoming street-connected as one that involves identity construction through the authoring of stories, which help young people to make sense of who they are and their place within the context of the street (e.g. Butler 2015). Similar to arriving on the street, leaving the street can also be thought of as a process of becoming in which young people develop a place for themselves in their new situation. Therefore, their stories of leaving the street could provide an understanding of their experiences of the transition. These stories of experience, remembered, retold and performed in the moment of retelling (Connelly and Clandinin 1990) were the basis for designing methods of data generation.

Using life story interviews (Goodson 2013) as a methodological starting point, I developed a semi-structured interview approach that became the main method of data generation used. The semi-structured interviews were used to generate stories. These stories provided descriptions of key life experiences of the participants, which, for the purposes of this study, constitute life stories. The research literature recommends that life story interviews be conducted over a number of sessions to develop greater depth to the data generated (e.g. Boyden and Ennew 1997; Cohen and Crabtree 2006). As I was particularly interested in the transitions young people made away from the streets, I conducted several sessions but engaged multiple methods to generate the stories. Visual sociology (Thomson 2009), where young people are actively involved in producing images as part of the research, was used to focus on, and develop greater depth to, particular aspects of the participants’ journeys away from the street (Prosser and Loxley 2008). The resulting stories were constructed using responses from semi-structured narrative interviews and focus groups, as well as the images created using visual methods (Riessman and Quinney 2005).

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Choosing to employ qualitative, open-ended and loosely structured methods of data generation (Cohen et al. 2011), provided the participants with the means to relate personalised experiences of transition, and to explain the social context within which these transitions took place. In addition, using a range of different approaches to data generation enabled better preparation for adapting to the needs of young people of differing ages, and in a different cultural context to my own (Punch2002). According to Flick (1998), qualitative research is ‘inherently multi-method in focus’ and the main benefit of the approach is that it offers the freedom to be flexible, iterative, and to improvise and adapt approaches to different research situations (Denzin and Lincoln 2000).

Stories were a means of examining the ‘ongoing struggle for purpose and meaning’ (Goodson 2013:20) that young people leaving the street undergo as part of the process of settling in to a new situation. In relation to such stories, identities are informed and performed (Bruner 1986), constructed and reconstructed, to varying extents, within the ‘mental space of [people’s] internal conversations’ (Goodson 2013:128). They involve layers of understanding in which a person organises their interpretation of events within a wider context of culture, social relations, values, beliefs, and priorities (e.g. Goodson 2013). Just as street-connected identities are constructed in relation to the context of the street, young people’s experiences of leaving the street, and the way in which they choose to remember them, influences a reconstruction of identities.

The lived experience may influence the story told by a young person leaving the street, but the narrative is crafted with a particular aim in mind (e.g. Riessman 2008). They are told within a particular context, affected by how the narrator perceives their place in society and, in this study, their understanding of my reasons for conducting the research. Therefore, the stories related, being performances constructed for me, the researcher as audience (Simpson 2003), would undoubtedly be shaped to meet any preconceived and inadvertent expectations of the research. As a British woman who may be positioned in a certain way (e.g. Milner 2007; Bhopal 2001), these expectations could have influenced the telling of what I choose to term the ‘NGO story’. The participants at Imani, Usaidizi and Matumaini, had previously related their life stories for use by the organisations,

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which were collected to develop case studies for their files and the search for sponsors. The strength of this similarity was that it enabled the participants to develop a certain familiarity with what was expected of them, but the similarity could also be described as the approach’s greatest limitation.

Employing multiple methods aimed to counter the effects of the NGO story. Visual sociology can tackle the power dynamic inherent to the researcher-researched

relationship, and generate data within an activity that does not resemble the day-to-day programme delivered by the three organisations. The participants were given some autonomy over the research process (e.g. Noland 2006; Collier and Collier 1986; Harper 1986). The images produced by the participants in this study all became the focus of image-elicitation interviews, or were created as part of a focus group activity, in which they related their reasons for creating the images and the wider story that was being represented (Boyden and Ennew 1997; Harper 1986). The effects of the research context cannot be removed completely, but using a drawing or photograph to relate the story provides a space in which the participants can determine the nature of the discussion (Liebenberg 2009). Within the space of the activities involved, the participants were able to exercise control over the mode of delivery of the method and how that translated into the story they chose to tell (see also Corcoran 2015b).

One of the main advantages of using visual sociology was the ability to include individuals or communities that are often excluded because of literacy levels. When conducting research with groups of young people who have spent time away from school, images were an effective method with which to engage them: ‘mediating conversations across linguistic, ethnic and cultural divides, and across boundaries between experience and inexperience’ (Howes and Miles 2015:16). Visual sociology appeared to be perfectly suited to research with street-connected children and youth, that are either on the street (e.g. Corcoran 2015b; Evans 2006; Wiencke 2008; Young and Barrett 2001a), or have made the transition away from it.

Adopting multiple qualitative methods to generate narratives enabled me to develop an idea of the context within which the young people made the transition from the street

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and provide depth to the process of the transition itself. I explain each of the methods in detail in the following sections.