After each interview I wrote down immediate thoughts on the interview process, reflections on each participant and insights that I might have gained. For instance after my interview with Margaret I wrote:
16:12:06 6pm - On a domestic flight after I had collected an interview with Margaret
• Utterly surprised by Margaret, she is a very different woman than I remember her at College.
• Margaret was open; she wore no masks, was insightful and articulate, and seemed happy to share her thoughts and time on this project.
• She shared her dissatisfaction at ‘taking on the male mindset’ and now nothing in her ministry is working. This gave me a chance to bring up how I viewed our relationship at College.
• Margaret seems broken, worn out and desperately looking for answers.
However I view this as positive; she is finding herself, her voice in ministry and wants to connect with female friends and desires to discover her feminine qualities. All this will create balance and hopefully joy in her life.
• She is desperate to ‘fit in’, needs to find a mentor that will understand her and nurture her.
• I feel inspired by her honesty, growth and courage as a woman and minister.
• Some prominent themes from her interview were self-care, identity, female epistemology, pastoral care issues, and burnout.
• I feel the interview process went well; Margaret was happy to talk and did not need much prompting from me. I was satisfied with my listening skills and enjoyed hearing her lived experience.
These post interview reflections became a valuable source when hearing the audio tapes and reading the transcripts. It kept me focused, enabled consolidation of ideas, and aided the analysis process. The transcripts were emailed to each participant for any amendments they wished to make, then were returned to me for analysis. Unfortunately one Clergywoman asked to be withdrawn from the study; all relevant information was returned to her.
3. 1. Reflection on the Process of Data Collection
Assuming the ‘phenomenological attitude’ was crucial in attaining access to the life-worlds and lived experiences of the participants without enforcing my research agenda or professional experience. I found that the phenomenological process aims for a deep understanding of the nature or meaning of the everyday experiences and that the understanding of the experience is its goal. I found that in the data collection process, my quest was an understanding of what it means to be human. And to revere that as a
truth, for each participant to be treated with dignity, awe and wonder of her human lived experience. This was evident as I collected the rich data from my participants.
As I heard the audiotapes and read the transcripts I became aware of the importance of language as a human expression and cultural bridge of understanding. I was also
surprised at how attentive I had become to the practice of reflection and thoughtfulness.
How the phenomenological process called upon me to exercise attentive listening skills, to feel the experience being described, to feel wonder and puzzlement and to raise my conscious awareness of the phenomena.
Upon critical reflection, even though I had assumed the ‘phenomenological attitude’ to uphold research rigour and validity; I discovered in the transcripts three places where I had interrupted my participant’s line of thought in the interview. In Margaret’s case I was quick to empathise and as a result missed out on something important she was about to describe. For example,
Margaret:
I knew I was meant to be there and when I was 16 years old I knew that all I wanted to do and what theology did for me was that it made me a man, which may
Drene:
Trust me I understand that.
Margaret:
Do you know what I mean? I came into it at 16…
Thankfully Margaret continued with her line of thought. However, I had let my biases creep into the interview; I should have sat back and listened more. But on the other hand, Margaret obviously felt comfortable with me and knew I did not have a ‘male mindset’ and was able to articulate her ‘male’ constructed identity during her time of theological education. I suspect she may not have disclosed this to another interviewer;
human meaning and understanding is exchanged between subjective human beings who share and experience life’s phenomena – is this not the goal of phenomenology?
I found interviewing a couple of the Clergywomen difficult because of our friendship.
With one participant we began energetic conversation because we had not seen each other for months, but by the time the interview began we both seemed rather ‘flat’
because we had spent too much time ‘catching up’. As a result the interview did not produce as much description of the phenomena as I had hoped.
Initially, I was concerned that I knew most of my participants fairly well and I questioned whether this would bias the research in any way. After the data collection process I was satisfied that because a relationship existed between most of the women, the data collection was much richer and I was content with the outcome.
I found the phenomenological method to be an interesting and a thorough process and was pleasantly surprised at the depth and richness of the data.