Method and Implementation: In-depth Interviews, Conduct of the Research and Important Research Concepts

4.6.1 In-depth Interviews as Narrative Research

There are a range of data-gathering methods available to the qualitative researcher. What must remain at the forefront of these considerations, is the need for the tools selected to be the most appropriate method of investigation; enabling the research questions to be answered or explored in the most meaningful way. This study set out to explore how DCSs seek to make sense of their professional identity in a unique professional public leader role, and to examine the extent of influences of structure, and of human agency, on identity construction and enactment. Narrative enquiry allows for individuals to make sense of their stories in the context of the social world and articulate, or consciously represent, their agency in it (Gill & Goodson, 2011). While this study does not claim to be a collection of life histories (as this was not the intention or epistemological inclination behind the research), it did capture important aspects of ‘life story’ (Miller, 2000) and work history in relation to the specific focus around professional identity, which as method is defined as narrative interviewing (Plummer, 2001). This contributed to building the subjective Psychobiographies of participants and captured the inter-subjective dynamics of Situated Activity represented in the first two broadly agentic domains of Layder’s (1997) Social Domains model.

In-depth interviewing was chosen as the most appropriate method for data-gathering, enabling me to explore the two key research questions in a loosely-structured way by eliciting participants’ narrative accounts and interpretations of identity. Focus Groups were also considered but two issues precluded utilising this as an additional method. The first was a very practical one: the DCSs are extremely busy senior leader- managers and securing time for an individual in-depth interview - which I deemed the most important method for generating subjective insights into the lives and perceptions of participants (Schostak, 2011), was challenging enough. I knew I would struggle to also have them participate in focus groups. I did not want to ask more than they could reasonably give. The second reason was that I believed the in-depth interviews would

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generate a good deal of rich empirical data in their own right. The particular dynamics created in focus groups can both stimulate discussion into themes which may not emerge in individual interviews, and suppress or distort contributions if dominant voices or unseen (to the researcher) undercurrents within a group known to each other are at work (David & Sutton, 2011). These dynamics would no doubt be insightful in themselves, but I feared would occlude those individual perceptions of interest to this study.

The in-depth interviews gave participants space to talk about critical life incidents and career trajectories (Chamberlayne, Apitzsch & Bornat, 2002), and share experiences in their current role as a DCS. In the process, they articulated and reflected on their interpretations of identity shaping influences and professional identity constructs. The exploratory discussion with one DCS from the sample was followed by a pilot interview with her shortly afterwards. This gave me confidence that there was a rich seam of empirical data to be elicited from the wider sample for investigating the research focus and questions. The pilot process also suggested areas for further theoretical reading related to emotional labour (Hoschchild, 1983), and helped me consider how best to probe and draw focus to the identity themes I was interested in. Burgess (1984, p.102) suggests that interviews are ‘a conversation with a purpose’. Even in the most unstructured interview, there will be an underpinning epistemological focus that will give some clarity of purpose and a degree of structure in terms of themes or broad areas of investigation to the encounter (the few loose questions for initial interviews in this study are included as Appendix 2). Indeed, within and beyond the social interaction of the interview situation itself, there will be also be meaning-making taking place (David &Sutton, 2011; Gubrium & Holstein, 2009) which problematises the interview process; making research “messy” (Schostak & Schostak, 2008) in the way stories of the self may be told (McAdams, 1996). It is also important to be engaged in the research process in a way that prepared narrative can be disrupted by interested questioning. In order to gain insight into participants own interpretations, or representations of how they view social reality, opportunities to challenge organisational and occupational discourse which are based on accepted ideology in policy and organisational practices need to be taken (Rubin & Rubin, 2011).

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4.6.2 Conduct of the Research

Once access was secured, the participants were hugely generous with their time. A first round of interviews with all fourteen DCSs was conducted over a nine month period. Most interviews took on average ninety minutes, although a few lasted more than two hours (with breaks). The interviews were all conducted at the DCSs’ places of work in the meeting rooms of office buildings, or the local Town Hall. One of the challenges was the time it could take to travel to each local authority as some were up to a hundred miles apart. This is partly why the schedule of interviews took some time to work through, but one of the benefits was the richness offered in the very different geographical, socio-economic and demographical environments the DCSs were located in. Each interview was recorded (with consent) and accompanied with short field notes.

Early the following year, I conducted five follow up face-to-face interviews and two telephone interviews with participants from the same sample over a further six month period. These tended to be shorter than the first interviews - mostly around one hour. This second set of interviews took place with DCSs who had expressed an interest in talking further about their experiences and feelings relating to professional identity in the role, or those I felt may have a little more to say once some initial rapport and trust had been built during the first round of interviews. There were also some significant policy and economic changes occurring in children’s services during the period of the research, which meant the DCS experience through these turbulent times benefitted from revisiting and had not yet reached saturation point.

The volume of data generated from twenty-one interviews was considerable and in all honesty, I had underestimated the sheer task of transforming recorded words to text. Having transcribed approximately sixty percent of the data (using ExpressScribe software) myself, the remainder was completed through a professional transcription service, with an incorporated confidentiality contract. The data analysis framework is discussed in section 4.8.

4.6.3 Important Research Concepts: Trust, Researcher Bias and Emotions

There are a number of key issues and concepts for the qualitative researcher to consider beyond design and method. In this study, trust and confidentiality were

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critically important aspects, not least because, as with many studies of human experiences feelings and perceptions, as researcher I was “entrusted with information of

a sensitive and sometimes quite personal nature” (Punch, 2014, p.46). Protecting the

confidentiality of such information, especially where being careless in published accounts can lead to identification of participants, was uppermost in my mind and is bound into some of the ethical issues discussed in section 4.7. There are issues of power too, although arguably much less so than in research conducted with people or communities already disadvantaged and facing inequalities and social injustices (Bourdieu, 1993). Nonetheless, all research involves issues of power and I tried to be mindful of the fact that I was entering the participants space; involving public and private spheres of what Stake & Jegatheesan (2008, p.8) call the “shadings and passages” of someone else’s world. While the DCSs might well be actively exploring the boundaries of what they were willing to share in interviews, this takes place in an emergent context, affected by influences of internal and external dynamics. They then trusted me in taking that information out of the situated context, to represent it in a public domain (Barbour & Scostack, 2011, p.62).

One way of viewing participants’ ‘talk’ in interviews is as an inter-subjective performance. Meaning is created within the participant-researcher relationship shaping the way social reality is represented. In fact Holstein and Gubrium (2011) argue from a constructionist standpoint that instead of getting tangled up in the methodological constraints of ‘how’ interviews should be conducted, researchers “should embrace the

view that the interview is a process of experiential animation [and] capitalise on the researchers and respondents constitutive contributions to the production of data”

(Holstein & Gubrium, 2011, p.151). Of course meaning making is a constitutive process and my own experiences – including the fact that I have been a senior manager in children’s services, my values and bias have an impact in the research encounters. I am ‘always present’ as researcher: “located in space, time, cultural milieu, and like anyone else influenced by the particular understandings about, and interpretations of, the world to which [I] have been exposed” (Sikes & Goodson, 2003, p.34). The participants too

are fully embedded in - and not independent from, the social and structural domains of our lived experiences. This was represented in my analysis and theorising of the data produced. I also acknowledge some tentative a priori themes based on my reading of the literature, previous management experience in children’s services, and academic

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interest in children’s services leadership in my current role as a tutor in a school of education and professional development.

So, in terms of validity and the degree to which I could achieve what I set out to do – to capture experiences and perceptions of the DCSs in relation to identity, and to bring new insights to the field of identity studies, my approach enabled this. Claims are not made for external validity because it is “impossible to ‘freeze’ a social setting and the

circumstances of the study to make it replicable” (LeCompte & Goetz, 1982, p. 33),

indeed nor would I want to, as a central strength of the qualitative study is its uniqueness; a portrait in time of social reality. This limits usefulness for generalising to other settings and contexts, but without being drawn into the debates about how much traditional measures from the natural sciences apply to social sciences research (Creswell, 2005; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Metcalfe, 2005; Silverman, 2011), I would argue there is potential for others studying similar phenomena - and interested in theory- building, to observe dynamics or insights from similar research which may suggest patterns (Falk & Guenther, 2007) to draw some tentative conclusions.

The final theme addressed in this section is emotions that can be invoked in research activity and processes. A common starting point around ethical considerations is the premise of ‘doing no harm’ to participants involved in research. In the social sciences this is often extended to not leaving people ‘any worse off’ than if they had not participated, or further still, in emancipative-based research, not conducting research that privileges one group but leaves others behind (David & Sutton, 2011). In raising or being privy to, sensitive and potentially emotive issues in interviews with the DCSs, it was important to consider my responsibilities as researcher. As Ryen (2011, p.432) observes: “Knowledge production comes with moral responsibility towards participants”. She emphasises the need to be alert to emotional stresses which can unfold in interviews and the significant potential - particularly in life story and narrative enquiry, to intrude, or even be invited in to some of the private “shadings and passages” (Stake & Jegatheesan, 2008, p.8) of people’s lives, and then not quite knowing what to do. Such experiences can form part of the emotional demands on the researcher. Anticipating and becoming skilful at dealing with some of the emotional subtleties in research involving people develops from time spent in the field developing reflexivity, and awareness of the:

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Complex and constantly negotiated and interrogated power dynamics in the research field, the researcher and participant both bring [their] subjectivities and emotional lives into the research encounter (Riessman, 2005, p. 476).

Issues of trust, validity, researcher bias and emotions are all bound up in the research endeavour. Effort and attention is needed at each stage - from research design to final publication of the study, in order to maintain the integrity of the data and the trust established with participants. While Hammersley and Traianou, (2012, p.136) are fully committed to these ‘intrinsic research virtues’, they caution against what can sometimes be seen as “excessive moralism” or “overdoing ethics” in research.