“To die is to be no longer human, to be dehumanized – and I think that language, speech, stories, or narratives are the most effective ways to keep our humanity alive. To remain silent is literally to close down the shop of one’s humanity” (Broyard, 1992) Applying an interpretive interview methodology means that we make “an inquiry with an attempt to be interpretively open to a topic at hand” (Hovey & Paul, 2007, p. 55). Interview methodology allows researchers to identify patterns of meaning in self-reported personal narratives, which, according to forgiveness researcher Kelley (2009), is “a productive and valid means of obtaining information about behaviors that are generally not accessible through direct observation, e.g., occurrences of forgiveness in daily interactions” (p. 259). According to Kreuter et al. (2007), a narrative is “a representation of connected events and characters that has an
identifiable structure, is bounded in space and time, and contains implicit or explicit messages about the topic being addressed” (p. 222). Narratives – or stories –ix give meaning to existential
suffering in the face of illness and death (Paley & Eva, 2005), both for the dying and the living. As physician, ethicist, and medical humanist Howard Brody (2003) states, “suffering is
produced, and alleviated, primarily by the meaning that one attaches to one’s experience… [and] the primary human mechanism for attaching meaning to particular experiences is to tell stories about them” (p. 5; see also Frank, 2013).
Lindlof and Taylor (2002), who refer to interviews as “the ‘digging tool’ of social science” (p. 171), explain that ‘‘interviews can tap a wider field of voices . . . [and] thus help inscribe a more nuanced understanding of past events’’ (p. 175). Interview methodology allows for a participant’s world to be revealed in their own words. For example, Brenner (1985) posits that interviews “quite literally… develop a view of something between (inter) people” (p. 148, italics in original). Lindlof and Taylor (2002) outline these central goals of qualitative
interviewing:
(1) Understanding the social actor’s experience and perspective through stories, accounts, and explanations; (2) Eliciting the language forms used by social actors; (3) Gathering information about things or processes that cannot be observed effectively by other means; (4) Inquiring about the past; (5) verifying, validating, or commenting on information obtained from other sources; [and] (6) achieving efficiency in data collection. (p. 173) Further, in-depth interviewing allows for what Stage and Mattson (2003) refer to as ‘tell me a story’ or ‘grand-tour’ questions which preserve the participants’ personal meanings and interpretation, and a semi-structured interview guide can ensure that specific key questions are asked while also allowing for an organic conversation to take place. Paget (1983) notes the significance of allowing this ‘reflexivity’ to shape an interview as it occurs, rather than pre- determining the data by pre-determining the interview protocol. She argues, “the answers given
continually inform the evolving conversation. Knowledge thus accumulates with many turns at talk. It collects in stories, asides, hesitations, expressions of feeling, and spontaneous
associations” (Paget, 1983, p. 78). Shiner and Newburn (1997) similarly note that semi-
structured interviews allow respondents to respond on their own terms and “raise issues that [are] important to them” (p. 520).
Qualitative interviews inherently present opposing demands: the demand to collect data that the study seeks, and the demand to respond with sensitivity to “a here-and-now interactional event in which these data are collected in and through talk-in-interaction” (Rapley, 2001, p. 310). Balancing these demands is important not only from a research standpoint, but from an ethical one. For example, because of the sensitive nature of this project and interview questions, a semi- structured in-depth interview methodology can anticipate participants’ need to guide the
interview in a direction that is comfortable and safe for them. In his experience of interviewing bereaved parents to understand narratives of recovery, Giannini (2011) highlights ethical
considerations that are best attended to by a semi-structured in-depth interview format. Giannini (2011) writes:
[R]eflexivity was taken to address the context of the interview, a nonbereaved parent [me] questioning bereaved parents. This was necessary to construct an interview guide that used nonabrasive, empathetic, and thoughtful words that made parents feel at ease, unthreatened, and safe to tell their stories. It made me cognizant of the power dynamics at play throughout the interview, after it concluded, and in writing their words to accurately represent the narrative described. (p. 548)
In-depth semi-structured interviews give way to data in narrative form. It is important to note here that while I sometimes refer to this project’s data as ‘narrative’ or ‘stories’ (which I conceptualize interchangeably), the interview procedure itself is not narrative interviewing. Lindlof and Taylor (2002) explain that “narrative inquiry is concerned with the study of entire stories, whereas other types of inquiry, such as informant and respondent interviewing, often
extract certain kinds of material – for example, opinions, themes, references to people and places – from stories for analytic purposes” (p. 180). While my methodology produced some data as potential ‘narratives,’ this data was not analyzed as a narrative form. Rather, I apply a grounded theory approach to analyze data via qualitative textual analysis, to look for themes and patterns that emerge from the data. Thus, my analysis looks at “the component parts of a phenomenon” (in this case, interview data) to derive meaning (Kramer, Boelk, & Auer, 2006, p. 794).
Grounded theory, developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967), is an inductive process of finding themes and patterns that emerge in the data and developing those findings into codes and categories. Open-coding analysis is used to label or designate data into categories or codes. “Coding can…help analysts locate cultural and interpersonal patterns in talk, stories, media content, and other narrative texts” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 249). Coding also involves “isolating the key moments” in the text and “attributing special meaning to them” (Goodall, 2000, p. 108). Coding then gives way to categorization of data: “Categories develop through an ongoing process of comparing units of data with each other” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 250), also referred to as the constant-comparative method. Repeating this analytic process of re- categorizing data by collapsing related categories into larger and broader categories was done until category sets became theoretically saturated. Theoretical saturation is “achieved when a consistent level of repetition regarding concepts and their relationships [become] evident” (Kramer, et al., 2006, p. 294).
A qualitative thematic analysis organized and analysed data to identify patterns and themes that reflected a general structure of communication processes of forgiveness in the end- of-life context. These themes were arrived at by identifying relevant words, phrases or quotes in the data, comparing those relevant data units across each interview in order to collapse/combine
themes, and ultimately arriving at a final of set themes that represents how the study participants spoke about forgiveness in the end-of-life context, and how that forgiveness-communication affected them.