Exploratory commenting and emergent themes

3.2.4.1 Working with the hermeneutic circle

As I began working through the interview transcripts, the idea of the

hermeneutic circle was a powerful way of working back and forth between the parts and the whole of my interview data, and navigating their interlinkages.

The hermeneutic circle speaks to an intuitive and ‘dynamic, non-linear style of thinking’ and is likewise ‘concerned with the dynamic relationship between the part and the whole, at a series of levels (Smith et al. 2009: 28). To understand any given part, you look at the whole; to understand the whole, you look at the parts’ (Smith et al. 2009: 28). Using this conceptual approach enabled me to navigate back and forth between intensive focus on the fine-grained detail of a particular discrete story, and then to connect this back to a larger narrative

‘whole’ that began to emerge as I worked my way through the interview

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transcripts, finding different layers of meaning at these different levels (Smith et al. 2009: 28).

The idiographic focus of IPA, its concern not only with detail, but also with the subjectivities of personal experience, for example in the unique way that an individual perceives a specific event, and the specificities of each unique context (Smith et al. 2009: 29), also provided a useful framework for drawing connections between the particular nature of an individual’s personal

experience, and the broader or more universal themes to emerge in the data.

3.2.4.2 Process and ethics of interpretation

The processes of conducting interviews, developing transcripts and reading and thinking about the transcripts happened in simultaneity. As soon as I had completed transcripts of the first interview with each participant (as well as a completed transcript from a second interview with Khan), I began working on the IPA analysis, generating exploratory comments on the transcripts and thinking provisionally about emergent themes.

In working through each transcript, and in the process to some extent re-living each interview, I often thought of myself as being in dialogue with each

interview, and experimented with making colour-coded notes in the margins of each text. The exploratory commenting was a playful exercise which

developed over many readings and re-readings.

I colour coded my comments according to several categories: ‘descriptive’

(keywords, phrases, events, assumptions, emotional responses, things that mattered to participants); ‘linguistic’ (pronoun use, pauses, repetitions,

fluency, use of metaphor); and ‘conceptual’ (opening up a range of provisional meanings) (Smith et al 2009: 83). In the process of doing this, I also began to draw conceptual and thematic connections to the interviews with other

participants as well as to the theory explored in Chapter 2. When connections such as this occurred, I made a note of it within the exploratory comment.

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Thus through the exploratory commenting, I developed a sense of being in dialogue not only with each particular interview, but also in an expanded dialogue across all of the interviews. Sometimes a point raised in one

interview would remind me of something another participant had expressed in a different context. I tried to catalogue all of these impressions faithfully, yet at the same time to resist drawing any definitive conclusions about anything while many different parts of the analysis were simultaneously emerging.

In this phase of the analysis, I also began to notice common themes of identity, process and power dynamics articulated by participants that

resonated with Katrina Brown’s theory of ‘everyday resilience’ as something that is ‘lived and practiced’ among diverse communities, and can be distilled into three core themes of Rootedness, Resourcefulness and Resistance (Brown 2015). I then also began to explore this potential link further in my exploratory comments, while trying at the same time to resist forcing my interpretations into these categories, and remaining open to other possible interpretations.

Eventually, I developed a numbered list of exploratory comments from each interview. This was derived by working through each interview transcript chronologically, so that the number assigned to each comment reflects its sequential order in the transcript. From this numbered list, I next developed a set of emergent themes. This step served as a bridge between the general and the particular, as I attempted to move from commenting on the direct experiences and reflections of participants, towards connecting this with a more general or abstract theme or idea. The emergent themes were likewise numbered according to the exploratory comment they derived from. Appendix C shows two examples, drawn from Mgcoyi’s interview transcript, of how this was done¹⁵.

15 For a complete table of emergent themes clustered under Brown’s three major themes of Rootedness, Resourcefulness and Resistance, see Appendices A and B.

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Navigating the ethics of interpretation was very important in the process. As I moved into the interpretive phases, generating emergent themes from the exploratory comments and linking these themes, I had to be guided by a sense of respect and responsibility to the person, and an awareness of the power dynamics of interpreting another person’s story. As I moved through the interpretations, I tried to keep asking myself: how do I think this person would feel about what I am saying? Would they recognise their own

experience in the interpretation?

As the examples in Appendix C illustrate, the analysis moved in stages from the particular to the abstract, while at the same time retaining the analysis of the particular within the exploratory comments (Smith et al. 2009). It was often difficult to pinpoint exactly where one comment should end and the next

should begin, however. Thus the process of analysis, while highly ordered, was at the same time messy, and continued to emerge and evolve right up until the final draft was written. In short, the process was far messier than the two illustrative examples provided in the Appendix might suggest.