Pilot Study

A pilot study was carried out to establish the length of the interview, to find about the

questions the participants might find sensitive, and whether it mattered if they had memorized the entire Quran or not. In addition, I wanted to know the sorts of answers the memorizers would come up with and which wordings of interview questions didn’t work and needed changing.

Two memorizers were interviewed in London. Both were my acquaintances, were Pashto speakers and were ethnically from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan and had been living in the UK for seven years. The interviews were conducted in Pashto and unlike the main study where participants were interviewed in the mosques, participants in the pilot study were interviewed at their respective residences (see below).

The pilot study proved to be very advantageous as it afforded me an opportunity to check the procedures before carrying out the main study. A couple of questions were taken out because they were asking for the same information. Also, wordings and the order of some questions were changed to make the interview schedule tidier, more precise and structured for the main study. Moreover, although the pilot revealed a couple of questions to be redundant, I kept them as back-up aids for my main study as I was not sure if the participants of the main study would behave the same way as the pilot participants. In a couple of interviews in the main study these back-up questions had to be used to elicit the required information.

The pilot drew my attention towards some unexpected behaviour of the human participants and made me mentally ready for any unseen manner of action or reaction from them. For example, the first participant refused to be voice-recorded, the interview with the second participant was disrupted a couple of times as he had to go out to answer a phone call.

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Although both these situations were a bit frustrating because I did not expect any such inconvenience, it prepared me for any unexpected behaviour or interruptions in the main study. I would, therefore, go for every interview with the idea that the interviewee might not want to be recorded and that I should be ready to efficiently and carefully take notes while he spoke. No participant in the main study refused to be voice-recorded, though.The most important contribution of the pilot, however, was that in their conversation the pilot

participants referred to the role of the visual image of the Quran that gave me the idea to talk to blind memorizers.

In terms of length of time, one interview lasted for 80 minutes, the other for 75. As some questions were taken out from the interview, the total time for the interview in the main study was one hour. It was in the light of the pilot interview that I had to change the location of the main study. Unlike interviewing the pilot participants at home, memorizers in the main study were interviewed in the mosque because, firstly, in the mosque there is least interruption from the outside. Secondly, while it was appropriate to interview the participants of the pilot study at home because I knew them, I wanted to use the mosque for interviewing strangers.

In the light of the minimal changes made, and due the comparable nature of the pilot and main studies, responses from the two pilot participants are included in the main data set. The total number of participants is, therefore, 10.

5.1.5 Procedure

The interviews were recorded with the permission of the participants in a room adjacent to the main praying hall of the mosques using a digital voice recorder. Despite recording the interviews, careful notes were made of the important points in case of problems with the recording later on. To ensure that all participants came up with their own personal experiences, and were not influenced by the thoughts of their fellow teachers, they were requested not to share the interview details with those who were not yet interviewed, to which they all agreed. Each participant was interviewed on a day of his choosing, depending on his availability and the time at his disposal.

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Normally I listened to and selectively transcribed the conversation on the day of the

interview. I would listen to the interview one more time after I had transcribed it to make sure that nothing important had been missed. I read and reread the interview transcripts for finding out key concepts.

The data were coded as follows: as a first step, each participant was labelled with a unique number. While all sighted memorizers were put in one group, blind memorizers were put in another group. The answers to any given question were listed together, so that the range of responses could be easily seen and compared. Information thus pooled from participants under different interview questions were then organized under relevant themes or research questions. This approach meant that when my participants said something in reply to one question that was more relevant to another, it could be moved to the most appropriate place in my analysis. The data were analysed by comparing and contrasting memorizers’ description of their experiences and perspectives on the processes of memorization and recall with findings from literature on memory for language. The findings are reported under theme headings in section 5.2.