Chapter 4 Methodology
4.6 Ethical considerations
My ethical approach is informed by the guidelines provided by the British
Psychological Society (BPS, 2009) and by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP, 2010).
Informed consent
Informed consent was obtained by letter from participants prior to conducting both the focus groups and the interviews. The letters included information on the
interview arrangements, the researcher, and the study and how data would be used and stored. There were also details about anonymity and confidentiality and contact details for me and my supervisors, should there be any concerns. All participants were advised that they could withdraw from the study at any point they wished. Consent forms were enclosed with these letters and were signed and returned to me prior to the commencement of the data collection.
Prior to the focus group and the interviews, the contents of the letters and consent forms were reviewed with the participants, to ensure they were still prepared to continue with the process and that they fully understood the implications of being involved in the study. No assumption was made that initial consent equates with on-going consent, and, consequently, consent was requested for each stage of the process. Participants were de-briefed as to the nature of the study at the end and offered the opportunity to read the research report.
Anonymity and confidentiality
The information and consent forms, signed before the beginning of the data
collection, guaranteed confidentiality and anonymity to all participants. In the write- up, pseudonyms were used to protect participants’ identities.
With regard to the focus group, although it is possible for the researcher to
guarantee confidentiality, there is no such ‘professional’ obligation for participants to guarantee confidentiality to one another. Therefore, at the beginning of the focus group, I negotiated a contract with the group about the nature of the discussion and mutual respect, including the importance of maintaining confidentiality.
De-briefing
I made myself available immediately after the focus group and interviews for initial debriefing (to individual participants) and reminded participants of my telephone number should they wish to be debriefed at a later date. With regard to written debriefing, I asked the participants how they would prefer feedback – suggesting either an anonymised transcript of each stage of the research (depending on which stage the participants were involved in) or a written summary of the main findings of the research (or both). In addition, I offered a report back to the support group of my findings plus a reference list.
Only one of the participants (pseudonym Caroline) requested a transcript of her interview. On reading the transcript she was anxious that she had revealed too much information which made her identifiable. Consequently, she spent some time wondering whether to withdraw from the study. On reassurance that she would be given a pseudonym and that all place names would remain anonymous, she consented for me to use her data. No other participant requested a transcript at that stage although all said they would be interested in reading a final summarised report. In formulating the participants as speakers rather than informants, the requirement for participant feedback to verify the interpretation of the researcher is not so demanded. As Jones (2003:99) states ‘whilst much recent work […] has emphasised participants’ rights, it is also important not to lose sight of the analyst’s rights to have thoughts with which respondents might not necessarily agree’. The main ethical tension I encountered was around managing potentially sensitive topics. In particular, I was made aware of how, in accordance with discursive approaches to language, marking something as a sensitive topic actually constitutes it as such.
Dealing with sensitive topics
All ethical guidelines point out the importance of sensitive interviewing and as Corbin and Morse (2003) indicate, when research is conducted sensitively and ethically, it can become a beneficial process to both participants and researchers. Following ethical guidelines, all the interviews were set up with the
acknowledgement that talking about experiences of having a child with ADHD might be a difficult and upsetting undertaking. All participants were advised of this prior to the commencement of the discussion groups and the interviews and were reminded that they only need disclose information they felt comfortable sharing, and that they could withdraw at any time if the situation became too distressing. Similarly, aware of the potentially sensitive nature of the research topic, my
questions were framed as sensitively as possible. However, the over-deliberation and excessive caution of my questioning does raise issues of what was being set up in the research situation. As Silverman suggests (2001b) such excessive caution works to construct ‘delicate’ objects, which in turn can position parents as fragile and their experiences as traumatic, when it is possible they may, more typically, construct different versions of their experiences. As I discuss in Chapter 7, the narrative arc of the majority of the interviews has been to begin with trauma. It is only towards the end of the interviews, or even once the recording has
finished, that parents describe the more positive experiences of parenting a child with ADHD. It is quite possible that the style of questioning shuts down, or at least, does not invite opportunities for participants to discuss more positive experiences.
Dealing with distress
As Jones (2003) indicates in her discussion of ethics, the boundaries between sensitive research and what other ‘experts do’ in fields such as counselling and therapy can become blurred. This was a particular tension for me as I practise as a counsellor, and it is quite probable that my ‘interviewing style’ is more redolent of that used within the talking therapies. Not wishing to blur the boundaries any more than was necessary, I attended the discussion groups and interviews with a list of potential support agencies to provide the participants should I have felt that they were in need of any (or further) therapeutic support. However, I did not pass any of these details as no participant expressed a wish for them.
The tension between my role as a researcher and my practitioner role as a counsellor was particularly difficult when participants became distressed. Within the therapeutic relationship, distress is (generally) mutually understood to be an integral part of the therapeutic process. Distress is not, however, a mutually understood part of the research process. Several of the participants became
distressed when describing incidents involving their children, and tears featured quite regularly in the interviews, as in the following example with Julie.
Julie: with T I felt really isolated cos I just felt we were completely… every other child was normal and I had the one child the oddbod child and I I did feel very isolated with T you know I just […] again I wasn’t particularly keen on encouraging friendships and things cos I didn’t’ want them to think ‘that one’s a bit weird’ (in a conspiratorial whisper) so yeah that was very isolating
Alison: mm
Julie: so I sort of got through it with a few friends (voice breaks a little)
Alison: mm mmm (pause) it must have really impacted on your … (J starts crying very quietly) are you ok? Sorry take some time out
Julie: sorry (reaches for the tissues)
Alison: I’m sorry
Julie: no no don’t don’t be it’s just you sort of forgot about it really but then…
Alison: it’s very…
Julie: then you remember just how awful it really was
Alison: mm dreadful and so uhm and so raw still really
One ethical decision to be made is whether to turn off the recorder when participants convey distress such as this. This attendance to the potentially
harmful effect of the research situation is informed by extensive feminist research, which is concerned with issues of power and inequality within the research
situation (Opie, 1992; Oakley, 2003; England, 1994). However, interpreting all instances of distress as damaging and violating potentially constructs participants as fragile and in need of protection, which may or may not be the case.
inherent in a research situation but can actually exacerbate it. Julie, in the above example, was aware that she could withdraw from the interview at any time, and at that moment I suggested that she take some time out. However, she continued to recount her story, and so, was exercising her ‘right’ as a participant to continue. Certainly, within a conversation analytic approach, crying is understood as a phenomena which has interactional consequences (Hepburn and Potter, 2012), and, in this sense, is not understood as an uncontrolled, outward manifestation of some inner anguish, for which the researcher has responsibility for managing. Crying is theorised as having different forms and functions depending on what is being discursively accomplished at the time. Hepburn and Potter’s study (2012) indicates that crying serves several purposes. It can work as a distractor, as a signal to move away from the conversation in hand. Previous research has shown that emotional formulations, such as crying, can also be used to support particular accounts provided by the speakers (Edwards, 1999, 1997) Within this approach, the crying recipient’s responses are also implicated with the production of tears. The recipient’s attentiveness (as in the example here) is displayed through
sympathetic responses which signal that the upset is appropriate and, as Hepburn and Potter (2012:209) suggest, ‘cut across issues such as how well the
interlocutors know one another, and relate instead to the intensity of the emotional experience’.
Whilst I have some reservations about the lack of account for why individuals might have more emotional investment in certain descriptions than others, the discursive approach to displays of distress does, potentially, afford more of an equal status to the researched/researcher relationship in that the person being interviewed is, theoretically, at least, accorded as much interactional power as the researcher (although it may not feel like it).
The tension between my needs as a researcher and the well-being of the
participants is partially resolved by considering that research interviews afford the opportunity for reciprocity. As Corbin and Morse suggest (2003), there are myriad reasons why participants might volunteer for research interviews and it is highly likely that they ‘get’ something from the experience, such as validation of their versions of events. After all, it is rare that individuals are given an hour or an hour and a half to recount a story from beginning to end with little interruption from the other. In Julie’s case she goes on to say that she cried because she had not thought about how difficult it had been for her before her son had had his diagnosis for a long time. In addition, Julie, like most of the participants interviewed, indicated that she hoped her story would help others.
Respect, power and the research situation
The concept of reciprocity was helpful to me in working through issues of power and entitlement, especially with regards to what I was encouraging participants to reveal for, essentially, my own ends. The conversational intimacy which is required for the participant to feel comfortable telling their story risks establishing the
researcher as ‘a friend’ rather than, as Corbin and Morse (2003) say, ‘an impersonal professional’.
The development of rapport and conversational intimacy is one that, in everyday conversation, typically involves the giving and receiving of reciprocal disclosures. The dilemma of disclosure has arisen for me on several occasions, but especially when conducting interviews in participants’ homes, which I did on three occasions (with Caroline, Jane and Alan and Gill and Mick). As Yee and Andrews posit (2006), the researcher may feel more inclined to reveal more about themselves or their project in someone else’s home because they are being good guests.
problematic, it might encourage the participant to reveal more information than they had anticipated and which they might later regret. For example, some of the participants that I interviewed admitted going through periods of hating their children. Ethically, I have been troubled by this, wondering how such admissions of strong emotion were experienced by the participants once the research context ended. However, I have come to realise that my own anxiety ignores the very discursive framework that I have set up and used to analyse participants’ talk. My anxiety is informed by an overly essentialist notion that participants, in talking about their ‘hate’ have revealed some innermost ‘truth’. Holding this position is untenable within the research approach I employ to analyse participants’ talk. Within a discursive framework the expressions of ‘hate’ articulated by some parents is accomplishing a discursive ‘act’, whether deployed as an extreme case formulation or as formulating strong emotion as corroboration of a version of events.
Disclosure is not encouraged within the BPS’ ethical guidelines; however, there is an argument that sharing information reduces the status difference between the researcher and researched, and there is debate on whether disclosure can lead to a more open and trusting relationship between the researcher and participant or whether it skews the course of the interaction. As Yee and Andrews suggest (2006), too much disclosure ‘could block off whole areas of the interview since the interviewee could assume that we already knew about the areas under question’. As an example of this I can compare the data collected from my two focus groups. In the first focus group, following a direct question, I disclosed that I did not have a child with ADHD. The main focus of the ensuing discussion was anecdotal
exemplars of how difficult their children’s behaviour was. They were scripting an ADHD child for me, as, perhaps, I did not really understand how that would be. In the second focus group, they did not ask me whether I had a child with ADHD, but
I feel that initially, at least, there was an assumption that I did, and possibly as a result of that, there was much less talk about how an ADHD child ‘is’ and much more sharing of useful strategies for coping and a focus on parenting skills. Again, analytically, this need not be problematic as the focus is on how speakers orient to the highly situated demands of the local contexts. However, the researcher needs to be aware of how such disclosures may be constraining the range of participants’ responses.
4.7 Summary
This chapter has outlined my methodological and theoretical approach. I have argued for a synthetic blend of discursive approaches to the talk of parents of children with ADHD. In particular, I have summarised the usefulness of the analytic tools of rhetoric work, interpretative repertoires and subject positions. I have described how I collected data through focus groups and interviews, and I have provided a reflexive account of my role in the formulation of this thesis as a version of the ‘truth’. This led to a consideration of some of the ethical issues which I encountered as a discursive researcher.
Significantly, the discursive approach adopted for this study theorises the participants as joint - producers of interaction, rather than informants who have access to an underlying reality which the researcher is intent on extracting. This, therefore, releases the researcher from discovering and revealing pre-existing truths but instead requires the researcher to examine how knowledge (reality) is produced.
In line with the approach put forward by previous discursive work (Shaw, 2002; Radley and Billig, 1996), this current study focuses on parents’ accounts of their
experiences, rather than their beliefs, and considers how these accounts are shaped by linguistic resources available in the wider social context.
In this way, I understand that I cannot make any claims about the speakers’
intentions when analysing their language in use and I understand my interpretation of what is happening in the interactions to be just one possible version of the truth. In the following chapters I present the data from the focus groups and interviews. In Chapter 5 I look at how parents talk about the category ADHD, specifically focusing on the interpretative repertoires that they draw upon to formulate their understandings. In Chapters 6 and 7 I examine how parents’ talk orients to the culturally prevalent binary representations of the blameworthy or valorised mother. Finally, in Chapter 8, I analyse how fathers take-up or resist the subject positions made relevant through the distinct interpretative repertoires available to talk about ADHD.