Immersion and understanding

Although interpretation began during the interviews with active attempts to make sense of participants’ responses, this discussion focuses on the subsequent immersion in the data and development of understanding. This involved listening to the audio recordings, transcribing, reading the transcripts and event diaries (including

consideration of the rich pictures) and highlighting, annotating and coding. Using NVivo8, it was possible to both ‘annotate’ and ‘code’ the data. I used annotations mainly in the first sweep of analysis to summarise ‘line-by-line’ what each statement revealed about the mentoring experience. I applied the coding function in NVivo8 to identify sections of text that revealed aspects of mentoring that could be conceptualised in a broader sense and ultimately facilitate development of main themes. This applied to all the texts. Also, I added an extra column to the NVivo8 transcript to record personal observations on the interview process or theoretical links that occurred to me while working with these data. The memo facility of NVivo8 was also a useful tool for noting and integrating reflections over time.

I considered each individual interview as a whole in the initial stages of analysis. Having both the voice recording and the transcript available in the same screen

facilitated listening and reading concurrently. Reading and re-reading allowed me to gain an impression of the dominant content elements of each interview and create a

representative statement. So, for example, holistic interpretation of Cate’s first two interviews yielded the following statements:

Mentoring is being sensitive to a student’s needs, abilities and stages of learning, offering up the possibilities for learning and being concerned for your team and your patients.

Mentoring means contributing to the profession, handling the expectations and values of yourself and others and constantly learning and adjusting.

Flossie was very different:

Mentoring is enjoying the buzz of having someone to teach and pass your knowledge on to, whatever the difficulties.

--- Engaging and dwelling in the hermeneutic circle ---

Mentoring means promoting your area of practice to students as something special and promoting and maintaining a respect for students amongst colleagues.

Having established a sense of the whole, detailed reading of each transcript line by line subsequently enabled me to annotate, paraphrase and summarise each point relating to the experience of being a mentor. I inductively grouped the resulting lists of short

phrases, or ‘first order constructs’ (Ajjawi and Higgs, 2007: 624) distilled in this way, into thematic categories. I often expressed them with gerunds (for example ‘being a

resource’, ‘adjusting expectations’ or ‘ticking boxes’) to facilitate a sense of person- environment dynamic, or comportment.

Below is an example from the initial analysis of Cate’s first two interviews, in which some of the transcript annotations were clustered into the collective theme ‘doing what has to be done’.

Doing what has to be done

Certain things need to be done – fire safety, interviews Using documentation from education provider

Ticking boxes

Doing goals

Getting the interview in Doing mid-way assessment

Ticking boxes (curriculum)

Knowing that your place needs filling in the short term future (providing for the future workforce)

Mentoring means fulfilling responsibility

--- Engaging and dwelling in the hermeneutic circle ---

Overall, there were twenty of such clusters for Cate, and other cases were of a similar magnitude, so at this stage the interpretation remained expansive and relatively concrete. I collated these initial thematic clusters along with the holistic readings and presented them to participants at the third interview. There, I asked them about their initial responses to seeing such interpretations of their accounts, and invited a detailed commentary on their thoughts about each set of themes. Was it a good representation of their mentoring experiences? They usually clarified a few minor points of detail, although their common reactions were amazement at the extent of what mentors actually did, and agreement that it was an accurate representation. Some participants sufficiently valued these interpretations to file them in their personal development records as evidence for their mentoring work. In this way, the co-construction of meaning between me and the participants (Nicolson, 2003) was clearly recognisable.

Initial immersion in and understanding of the rich pictures occurred at three main levels of engagement. First, there was my initial ‘gut’ feeling to the picture as a whole, along with trying to understand what it represented (assisted, in most instances, by the event description in the diary). Second, the interviews made it possible to ask the participants to expand on the event and the picture, in essence, to ‘fill in the gaps’ or offer further reflections on the event and the drawing process. Third, a more formal analysis drew on the pioneering work of Guillemin (2004) who adapted Rose’s (2001) framework of ‘critical visual methodology’ for use with drawings.

Guillemin’s (2004) research focused on women’s experiences of menopause and heart disease, combining the drawings with qualitative interviews. Rose’s earlier

framework operated in three ‘sites’ where it was proposed that meanings are made: the site of production of the image, the image itself, and the site where the image was seen by various audiences. Guillemin’s (2004) modification resulted in three sets of questions (see Appendix D). Below is my further modification as used in this current study.

--- Engaging and dwelling in the hermeneutic circle --- 1 About the production of the picture (the context)

Who drew the picture? What was the response of the drawer to the request to produce the picture?

When was it made? What events preceded the drawing? Where was the picture made?

What are the relations between the drawer and the subjects of the picture?

2 About the picture

What is being shown? What are the components of the picture? How are they arranged?

What relationships are established between the components of the picture? What use is made of colour? What is the significance to the drawer of the colours

used?

What do the different components of the picture signify? What is being represented?

What knowledges are being deployed?

Whose knowledges are excluded from this representation?

Is this a contradictory picture? (to other data collected, for example, in interviews)

3 About the relationship between the picture and the audience

Who was the original audience for this picture?

Where is the viewer positioned in relation to the components of the picture? What relation does this produce between the picture and its viewers? Is more than one interpretation of the image possible?

I analysed each rich picture using these questions after completing the interviewing process (see Appendix E). The findings helped to deepen insight into the mentor experience, enhancing the thematic analysis of the verbal data.

Altogether, these different ways of working with the interview and event diary data enabled my knowledge about mentors’ experiences to develop, and my understanding continued to develop throughout the analysis and interpretation.