Phases of analysis 100

I have conceptualised the analysis phases as commencing straight after the first interview was complete – it was an ongoing process, which I adapted as the empirical material developed and I refined the analytical insights. I have mapped out the phases below. On the surface it appears to be a clean, linear pathway, however the experience was very different. It was a somewhat ‘messier’ course. I navigated this with support from both the research methods literature and ‘trial and error’ attempts at finding the most fruitful ways to explore and present the depth of material.

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“Hearing the stories”

This phase came directly after each interview and involved reflecting on the interview with attention given to the behaviour/body language of the participant, the interview context and my own thoughts on how the interview progressed. The reflections I made helped to build my research diary. Bogdan and Biklen (2003) suggest there are two distinct types of field notes – descriptive and reflective. Descriptive field notes provide a word picture of the setting and the participants. Reflective field notes capture the researchers frame of mind, ideas and concerns; they reflect a more personal account of the process. The emphasis is upon speculation, problems, ideas, hunches, impressions and prejudices. I have avoided labelling these as ‘field notes’ as they are expressed in the literature, instead opting to conceptualise these accounts as forming part of my research diary. I ‘labelled’ them in this way to alleviate the potential pressure involved in writing them and to allow the reflections to develop organically as part of a continued process of reflection. Scott and Usher (1999) stress the importance of the reflective style of such accounts as their goal is to allow the researcher to consider who they are, how they think and where their ideas came from during the course of the study.

“Transcribing the material”

This phase involved the transcription of the interview material. The transcriptions of the interview were verbatim, including all utterances by both the participant and myself. I also included all of the non-lexical parts of speech, such as ‘mmm’ or ‘uh-huh’, etc. and places where there was laughter or moments of silence. Conducting a life history analysis involves immersion in the transcripts (Allen-Collinson 2011); personally I undertook transcription of all the interviews. Transcribing interviews is a time-consuming exercise, however it allowed me to ‘get closer’ to the data and develop an additional layer of familiarity with the raw material.

The initial transcript was then sent back to each participant so they could correct any spelling mistakes, names or terms. This also provided them with the opportunity to add information that might have come from the first interview and also delete any parts of the conversation they were uncomfortable with. None of the participants asked for anything to be removed; however one of the participants changed a technical term that is used in archery, which I had spelt incorrectly. The seven women involved indicated that the transcripts were an accurate reflection of their experiences.

“Interpreting the first interviews”

After the first interview with each participant I read the transcript closely to look for any emerging themes and ideas to follow up in the second interview, which is a common approach in life history research (Allen-Collinson 2011; Walseth 2006a). This phase correlates with the

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idea of ‘multiple interviews’ previously discussed. I used this time to draw out topics that could be followed up during the second interview (Charmaz 2003). Tentative themes began to emerge and I compiled a table of these that included blocks of text from each interview. When I had completed this, I practiced a ‘free-flow’ writing exercise for each participant’s transcript with some initial analytical reflections. Engaging with the data in this way helped me to record my ideas – it also enabled me to trigger ‘new’ meanings as I went through the process.

“Engaging with the interview transcripts”

This phase commenced after both interviews with each participant. I immersed myself in the interview ‘texts’ and began identifying their smaller sub-stories. I linked these with the tentative concepts I had started to see after the first interviews. I also explored the variety of factors that could have contributed to how the participants described themselves, as well as the contexts. With both interviews now collated as texts, I slowly began the process of combining the data from both interviews. I started this through a slightly ‘old fashioned’ method, utilising highlighter pens – each colour matched a ‘theme’ that was being discussed in the interview(s). For instance, if the participant was talking about their experiences in relation to impairment, school, sport or barriers related to ‘disability’, then these were illuminated with a different colour. These all represented different ‘life themes’ that helped me to organise the data. This was to facilitate the next phase of the analysis process, which involved combining all of the interview data into one ‘narrative’ (Germeten 2013). It also demonstrated more clearly the areas of the participants’ lives that were most pertinent.

“Narrative construction”

It was during this final part of the analytical process that the narratives were constructed. Constructing the narratives was both holistic and fragmented as I moved between the two interview transcripts. The narratives were formed in light of the themes highlighted in the preceding phase. Each narrative has been broken down according to these ‘life themes’ (Taber 2013). As much as possible within each theme, I attempted to keep the events in chronological order. The nature of storytelling contributed to the difficulties associated with this process. When a person is recalling memories or reflecting on past experiences, these moments are not prefaced with a specific time and date. Therefore, I pieced them together chronologically based on a holistic picture I built up of their story and timelines. For instance, if they were talking about a memory of when they were first involved in sport, I knew this would have come before an experience at a national competition.

I ‘cleaned’ the transcripts up and did not include any of my own speech from the interviews. Life history analysis focuses on ‘representation’, so I did not attend heavily to these interactional

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dynamics. Furthermore, I was not using a form of analysis that required a ‘detailed’ transcription. Germeten (2013) argues that the researcher constructs a ‘new’ story with a logic that may be different from the order in which the participant presented things. The researcher controls the logic and it derives from the statements that were selected to create a holistic history/story. Finally, I ended up with seven full narratives and I have included a brief snapshot of each in the following chapter. I believe that (re)presenting the data in this form is more powerful and this force would be lost if the words were confined to a dense interview transcription.

“The question of which concepts should be accorded strength and weight is always the researcher’s dilemma. Construction of research narratives is perhaps closer to fiction than we like to think” (Germeten 2013, p.623). This is an aspect of the ‘narratives’ I have considered many times. By reflecting on this, I am attending to Riessman’s (2008) call for researchers to make clear the role they play in constructing the narratives of their research. Germeten (2013) suggests on an epistemological level the ‘fit’ between the narratives as presented and the life that has been told will never be perfect. The social world will always be an interpreted one, both from the participant’s and the researcher’s view. Being transparent about the role I have played encourages a dialogue of self-reflexivity – the narratives will only be one form of interpretation/representation. Notwithstanding this, they are rich and valuable products of the research process. The seven narratives provide a complex insight into the interactional negotiations these women are engaged in.

I then immersed myself in the narratives as a whole and went through another ‘close reading’ phase. I started to look for situations and contexts where the participants discussed how they viewed and felt about themselves in these moments. I was drawing the concept of ‘identity(ies)’ out from implicit descriptions and specific experiences that seemed pertinent for these women. This involved unpacking how the participants were talking about themselves, how they were (re)presenting their bodies in different contexts, how they were viewing their bodies and the expectations/perceptions they had of other people in these interactional spaces. This stage of the analysis involved drawing together the themes around identity, gender and the body that were emerging from the narratives, and framing these within the broader theoretical framework. I took an inductive approach to the analysis (Patton 1990), which involves immersion in the details and specifics of the data to explore the important categories and dimensions.

After I had taken these tentative ‘inductive’ steps, I conducted another ‘free-writing’ exercise. This time I was engaging more explicitly with the data using the theoretical framework by looking through the lens of symbolic interactionism to see how the participants brought meaning to their experiences. I was also thinking about what I couldn’t ‘see’ using this approach and how

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I could incorporate other theoretical concepts. At the end of this phase I collated the connections I made between the empirical and theoretical material, which subsequently resulted in seven theoretical ‘commentaries’. These commentaries formed the basis of the following analytical chapters. The analytical phases that I negotiated provided a way of looking at the empirical material that would not have been possible with the raw transcripts alone (Barone 2007).