Personal Reflexivity on the Process Initial Assumptions

Looking back, my personal experience of therapy had at times made me feel unseen, misunderstood and hopeless. This was due to a lack of racial validation and a seeming discomfort on my therapist’s part to engage in discussions about race.

Hope, however, prevailed when my therapist actively engaged with (and sometimes led) the creation of a safe space where we could explore together what it means to belong to an often-overlooked minority racial group. Because my experiences were clear to me, it seemed logical to make them overt in the data by including myself as participant.

Choice of Sample

Although there is little research into those who are of South East Asian–White mixed race, Standen (1996), himself of Korean-white origin, claims that there needs to be research into specific ‘ethnic group out-marriage’. Root (1992) warns that recruiting participants from multiracial groups often leads to selective sampling techniques but this is what this study needed. In addition, by selecting a sample of those who are of South East Asian-White mixed race, some would therefore argue that there is too much diversity of experiences. Whilst I accept that, on deeper probing, there may have emerged significant differences between the participants, I believe that the themes that have arisen in this process show areas of commonality. I also feel that the findings are relevant to a broader group of people who all have experience of being ‘unseen’ and whose racial mix is difficult to categorize. Hopefully, therefore, regardless of the participant group, this study will spark the interest of a wider audience.

Self as Participant

As already highlighted, another key area where my reflexivity has been critical is in the inclusion of myself as participant. Whilst an important element of IPA is that the data is created as a result of collaboration between the researcher/interviewer and participant, I have had to be very careful to extract my own views and input where appropriate and ensure my interpretations were made from a distance.

Song and Parker (1995) have looked at commonality and difference in in-depth research interviewing and they suggest more attention be given to assumptions that interviewees may make about the researcher’s cultural and racial identity as they may withhold or disclose certain information depending on feelings towards the researcher. I feel that it was clear to my participants that I belonged to the same

broad racial mix as them and I sensed this allowed them to open up and feel accepted from early on in the interview. This ‘knowing we were similar’ could have been because of a phenomenon that is acknowledged by those who are mixed race whereby one gets a ‘“nondescript” feeling‘ (Standen, 1996:p.256) about being similar to others. However, my aim was to clarify that I was interested in their experience and there was never any intimation that I assumed to know their experience. I believe that this was partly because of the pool from which I chose my sample (ie psychological therapy trainees) as well as the fact that it was unlikely that we had exactly the same mixed parentage, which was true.

From early on in the process, I felt that the research would not be complete for me without the inclusion of my own narrative. Despite the challenges along the way and the undoubted questioning I face, I do not regret the decision to take a more inclusive role in this study. It has been important for me to incorporate myself and be visible as a member of the participant group and I believe it adds richness to the data, which takes one step further the idea of personal reflexivity. Whilst this is not a piece of action research, I can relate to Humphrey’s (2007) advice on taking charge of the hyphen between the notions of insider-outsider, and/or researcher-participant.

Rather than allow myself to be pulled or pushed along the continuum, thereby losing sense of identity in the piece and the process, I have been mindful to appreciate my unique position in becoming the hyphen itself and holding the tension between attaching myself to the two worlds whilst ‘cultivating a sense of non-attachment which allows for critical and creative growth’ (p.23).

I hope that when my participants read the research (as I have offered and some have requested) they will see that I was not objectifying them as 'subjects' - rather exploring their experiences alongside them whilst exploring my own. I also hope to open the way to other people using IPA in this way, should it be deemed successful as this self-inclusion can hopefully allow those who share in an experience close to them to analyse, share, and explore the findings in a more integrated way.

In relation to my own interview, at the end of it the independent researcher and I reflected on the impact of her being white. She said she had been aware of this during the interview and I wonder if this led her to tread carefully to avoid falling into a power dynamic. When I reviewed the transcript, there was less focus on the mixed

race experience than in the other four interviews, which suggested that the co-created experience was inevitably different with a mis-matched researcher-participant dyad than it had been with matched dyads. The use of the independent researcher has potentially tipped the balance in favour of trustworthiness at the expense of consistency.

Analysis and Interpretation

Early on in my first analysis, whilst excited by my progress, I found myself feeling slightly uncomfortable with the process of distilling the participants’ experience.

Whilst the distillation process was producing rich data, I felt ‘positively disloyal’ (Gee, 2011:p.18) due to my concern that I was objectifying the individual’s words and limiting their experience, which felt disrespectful – even though I had made it clear to all participants that this was the process I would be undertaking. I wrote in my research journal

‘I feel some barrier to putting my participant’s experience into ‘cubes’ of data for me to analyse and also of interpreting her experience. Who am I to interpret what she has so willingly and bravely shared with me?’ August, 2013

I was reticent because I could see myself, in some way, mirroring the experience of boxing in or fragmenting precious, personal experiences. To overcome this discomfort, I found it useful to think of the importance of the research and my motivation to highlight the experience of hope that is otherwise often taken for granted – as well as the particular experiences of an often hidden group. I also took comfort in supervision and Smith, Flowers and Larkins’ (2009) words: ‘at each stage the analysis does indeed take you away from the participant and includes more of you. However, ‘the you’ is closely involved with the lived experience of the participant – and the resulting analysis will be a product of both of your collaborative efforts’

(p.91). I also reminded myself that my participants had taken responsibility for themselves when they agreed to take part and that they were neither vulnerable nor coerced in any way. Finally, I recalled several participants’ comments that it had been interesting to reflect on hope and that they would go on to think about this more

in the future. I received feedback such as ‘it’s been really interesting...’, ‘I’m really into multi-race...’ and one participant asked me for further reading as she realised how much more she wanted to explore the area after our time together.

I held on to my belief that the process would be valuable for the participants as it allowed them to digest further important elements of their therapeutic and life experiences. Whilst clearly not the same as personal therapy, I likened this process to the therapeutic skill of reflecting back to a client their experience and, if appropriate, shedding a different light on it which is so often valuable within the therapeutic dyad. By seeing my research in this way, I was able to reframe what had initially felt like a dishonouring of and potential intrusion into personal material as an honouring of these experiences.

In addition, when she reviewed my initial analysis of my own transcript, the independent researcher commented that I was on the right tracks but that my analysis lacked the detail I had achieved in other interviews. This observation had been lurking just outside my own awareness and on reflection, I was able to see that this reticence to immerse myself in my own data was due to the slight discomfort I still had about using myself as participant. It felt narcissistic and uncomfortable but I had to reframe this as essential to the research process: without a similar depth of analysis, I would be unable to justify the inclusion of my data.

Chapter 4: FINDINGS

As I had hoped, a large amount of data was generated from the interviews. I analysed the data as described in the previous chapter and this chapter details these findings. For each interview, categories emerged and these were integrated across the interviews to create themes, which I divided into superordinate and subordinate themes (Table 1 overleaf).

As I present these findings, it will become apparent that there were areas of similarity and difference between the experiences of each participant. Because of the sheer volume of data, I have selected a sample of extracts to illustrate the key areas, including those which were particularly poignant or which were contradictory to the majority. Interspersed throughout are certain extracts from my own interview, which similarly either chime with or stand in contrast to the majority. I have also drawn out a table that shows which themes presented for each participant (Appendix 8).

I acknowledge that there will have been alternative ways for me to cluster the themes, however, after several iterations and a lot of reflecting, I feel that the themes I have chosen best represent the findings. Although this ordering is required and makes the data more manageable to present, there are areas of crossover between some of the themes.

In presenting these findings, I have used the following annotations:

- Participant quotes in ‘italics’

- Prosodic comments in (...) and ‘italics’ eg (laughs)

- Substitutions to aid comprehension eg [my therapist] instead of [she]

- ‘...’ to show that the quote starts mid-sentence or to clarify where a section of text has been excluded as irrelevant

- extracts from my reflective journal in a handwriting font eg ‘reflective journal’

- my own interview data appears in text boxes so as to allow the reader to follow this line of reflection clearly

In addition, I use the term ‘therapist’ hereon in rather than ‘psychological therapist’ as this was the word used by all the participants.

Table 1 Master Table of Themes

SUPERORDINATE THEME SUBORDINATE THEME

1. The Paradoxical Experience of Hope 1.1 ‘Doing’ Qualities of Hope 1.2 ‘Being With’ Qualities of Hope 1.3 Hope as both Positive and Negative 2. The Contrast of Hopelessness 2.1 Feeling Stuck

2.2 Low Mood 3. Therapists’ Qualities that Engender

Hope

3.1 Being With

3.2 Active Engagement 4. The Importance of Being Seen 4.1 Invisibility of Race

4.2 Visibility of Race 4.3 Hiding Oneself

5. The Integrated Experience 5.1 Feeling Integrated in Oneself 5.2 Feeling Integrated with Others

5.3 Split Experience of Being Mixed Race