Ethnographic interviews

As a method for conducting qualitative research, interviewing was an effective method for tuning into the inner voice of the participants where it presented an unusual dynamic that required the participants to divulge personal or emotional information in the presence of a complete stranger, breaking down the more presentational barriers of the guarded outer voice which often prevailed (Seidman, 1998). Therefore, carrying out ethnographic interviews in my own culture required for me to “make the familiar strange,” or make visible what is implicit and taken for granted aspects of sexuality, helping to provide interpretive and descriptive analysis of the symbolic and contextual meanings in everyday life sex education practices. This helped to provide access to what was "inside each of their heads", allowing the collection of data on what they knew on sexuality, their likes and dislikes (values and preferences) and what they thought (attitudes and beliefs), also highlighting the experiences that occurred in their lives at any given time (biography).

For generating data for this research, interviews were found to be the most appropriate method to help in the awareness of the nature and significance of the developments in relation to a phenomenon that has not been explored much by scholarly articles.

All the interviews were conducted in colloquial, conversational manner, using an interactive–relational approach. By developing an interactive and relational stance, the researcher was able to access knowledge and data that would not been otherwise possible to collect through formal structured questions alone. Such an approach was very necessary and effective for the interviews considering the reserved and sensitive issue of sexuality.

Through the interactive-rational approach, the researcher was able to establish a relationship with each interviewee and this facilitated the flow of acquired knowledge that

would otherwise not have been disclosed. The Interviews provided the study with the opportunity to acquire and yield data through argumentation, interchange, conversation, discussion, and to a certain extent consensus. The interviews were all recorded on audio-recorder with the consent of the interviewees and constituted important primary sources of information for the study.

Although the interviewees understood the English language reasonably well, the researcher made an intentional choice to conduct the interviews in Shona, because it was far much easier and more comfortable to tackle Shona culture sexuality issues in the language they were comfortable in. It is important to mention that the English language is an official language of Zimbabwe although most indigenous people still treat it as a “foreign” colonial language. Therefore, using English for interviewing my own people would have sent very wrong signals about me trying to assume a superior status of a person who is no longer able to communicate in her own mother tongue, one who disregards her culture and identifies herself as one of the “elite”.

The Shona easily presume that if a native Shona speaker communicates in English all the time they automatically belong to an upper class with a better social status that is economically and academically advantaged. It is not surprizing for the Shona to behave in such a manner because it is the lingering evidence of the socio-economic divisions of the colonial era, where the English speakers were the colonizers and Shona was spoken by the indigenous folks. This kind of division and segregation automatically resulted in socio-economic structures that were clearly defined into “them” the English, and the “us”, the native Shona. It is therefore not surprising that up to the present date, a native Shona who only uses English as only their form of communication are labelled as “upper class”. This however

distances and detaches them from their people who may feel secluded, ignored, betrayed, let down or even disrespected up to some extent. To curb this constraint, the researcher therefore used Shona for almost all the interviews conducted; by so doing, she was able to do away with the probability of being identified as one of them, but as an “alien”. This helped to easily and closely connect better with the interviewees.

The study used ethnographic interviews to gather cultural data where the researcher focused on Shona culture through the young women’s perspective and through first-hand encounter. It was an effective method that helped to highlight the nuances of the culture. The researcher was careful enough not to impose her values through the phrasing of questions or the interpretation of data. Descriptive questions allowed to collect a sample of young Shona women. Structural questions on the other hand helped to discover the basic units in the young women’s cultural knowledge, and contrast questions provided the study with the meaning of various sexuality terms.

There was no complication in attaining trust and in having a close harmonious dialogue with each and every participant, which allowed the researcher to easily gain the necessary rapport. There was no need to familiarize with the understandings of the young women that participated in the study because of two basic reasons. Firstly, the researcher had once lived in different parts of Zimbabwe and could speak various Shona dialects and was well aware of the different ways that certain sexuality terms could be expressed. Secondly, she was born and brought up in Zimbabwe and therefore a Shona native speaker who received her education in mission, government and private schools. The other contributing factor is that she was brought up in a family which lived a typical religious Shona culture in a Zimbabwean lifestyle.

My father being a Church Reverend, the nature of his job made our family undulate between the different parts of the different regions of the country, both rural and urban. This hence justifies the background of my upbringing. Having been born and brought up in the late sixties and seventies, the heart of the colonial era in the then Rhodesia, I still have vivid and interesting memories of my experiences in the colonial times. This background created conducive environment to carry out my research without having to face a lot of challenging obstacles. My background served as a jump-off point for my research because it help me acquire information much faster, that is, to find answers for the ´who`, ´how` and ´what`

questions. Besides, I had ample knowledge of the different formalities, protocols and approaches that I needed to employ while dealing with the individual interviewees. I was also familiar and aware of the uniqueness of each participant and the expectations of the society when addressing sensitive subject matters on sexuality.

Although my aim was to pursue an interactive process which facilitated continuous dialogue between sexuality concepts, assumptions and an ever-growing data base of empirical knowledge obtained from the young African women´s life experiences on sexuality, gender roles and relations, local practices and norms, this approach however faced challenges when questioning people in their native languages. For example, there are no words to describe sex and sexuality in my local Shona culture without the very real risk of sounding vulgar. Which is a common problem encountered by curriculum developers who shy away from such words and replace them with euphemism such as “guidance and counselling” “life skills” and “life education” (Amanze, 2010).

For a successful analysis that is theoretically coherent and consistent, a six phase approach was used based on proposition formulated by Braun and Clarke (2006, p. 88-89).

• Familiarisation with the data: reading and re-reading the data.

• Coding: generating succinct labels that identify important features of the data rele-vant to answering the research question; after coding the entire dataset, collating codes and relevant data extracts.

• Searching for themes: examining the codes and collated data to identify significant broader patterns of meaning; collating data relevant to each candidate theme.

• Reviewing themes: checking the candidate themes against the dataset, to determine that they tell a convincing story that answers the research question. Themes may be refined, split, combined, or discarded.

• Defining and naming themes: developing a detailed analysis of each theme; choosing an informative name for each theme.

• Writing up: weaving together the analytic narrative and data extracts; contextualising the analysis in relation to existing literature.