Choosing a fieldwork location
The issue of the location of my field research became pressing as soon as I chose
“Bradford.” For a start, what does the name “Bradford” represent? Throughout my study, would I mean the city of Bradford or the Bradford Metropolitan District? It is
striking that the understanding of what the name of the city means is spatially and historically situated. The Bradford Metropolitan District boundaries in 2012 have little to do with those of the rural market town that was on the cusp of industrialisation at the start of the Nineteenth century. In particular, the establishment of the Metropolitan District in 1974, which made areas on the outskirts of Bradford such as Keighley, Haworth and Ilkley part of the District, make it necessary to pay attention to denomination. For example, as I attended an event looking back at the city’s response to the English Defence League demonstration in August 2010, I observed that the public figures who addressed the audience, including an elected councillor and the chief executive of the council, kept referring to “the District,” whereas group discussions I took part in brought up challenges facing the city centre. However, all were still talking about “Bradford.” Considering the wide range of meanings of “Bradford,” I realised that it would be difficult to produce research that would equally represent inhabitants of Ilkley and of the City Centre, respectively one of the richest and one of the poorest wards in the District (City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council, 2010) and which are also 15 miles apart.
Consequently, I decided to focus my research on one much smaller area of Bradford, which I will refer to as Billesley to ensure the data I use remains anonymous. I picked this area for three reasons. First, it played a prominent part in the history of the city. A township at the start of the nineteenth century, it was geographically very close to the city itself. It became part of the Incorporation of the Borough in 1947 (Hird, 1966). It played a great part in the iron and worsted industry in the city and has a rich industrial heritage. Second, it is near the city centre, but preliminary observations showed that it has not been researched as much as other inner-city areas of Bradford. Indeed, the potential of going into an area that had been over-researched was an ethical concern for me, which I will explain further in the next section. Since starting my research in Billesley, other research projects have taken place there, but I am confident that the people I approached through gatekeepers were given the opportunity to decline taking part
in my research or to choose to leave the research process at any time, which, I believe, was an appropriate safeguard to exposing inhabitants to too much research. And third, it is characterised by a mixed population. The white population is dominant, with around 46%,12which is below the District average, whereas Asian residents represent another 43% of the population, above the District average. The Black population and Other Groupings respectively account for 5% and 6% of the population, both above the District average. It is also worth noting that the area is classified as deprived and rates high on the Vulnerable Localities Index, and can be qualified as a “less affluent inner urban ward.” (Richardson, 2002: 149)
b – Being in the field: Challenges of researching within a
“community”
Negotiating access and impact on sampling
Being in the field was a learning curve and several aspects of the fieldwork put to the test the theory that I had learnt from books, none less so than establishing and managing a relationship with gatekeepers. Theoretically, a recommended step in fieldwork is to identify, get in touch with and meet gatekeepers. Having no contacts or prior knowledge other than from books or newspapers of Billesley, this seemed like a sensible step to take. I may have been under the impression that it was all about convincing the gatekeeper of the worthiness of my project and that the research process would fall into place thereafter. I was introduced by a friend who works in Bradford to Gatekeeper A, a public sector worker in one of the many community organisations of Billesley. Gatekeeper A was very interested in my project and in our first meeting agreed to help me with recruiting participants. I left this meeting reassured that I had successfully passed the gatekeeper test. In a sense, I had; but our next meeting highlighted that “gaining access” is not just about convincing one gatekeeper of the worthiness of one’s research.
12 Statistics are indicative only to minimise the chances of identifying the exact location of the fieldwork and thus protect the identity of the participants.
Our second meeting presented some challenges that I would have to deal with in the remainder of the fieldwork. Gatekeeper A was a lot more hands on than I expected, making phone calls on my behalf to their contacts, giving them their own interpretation of what my project was about and setting up times and locations for interviews. I recorded my reaction in my research diary:
A second concern is that although Gatekeeper A has very kindly started setting up some interviews for me, it means that I miss out on an initial first contact with the people I will interview and I lose ownership of what I am doing.
The first concern was that of “giving back,” which I will mention here briefly but will look at in more detail later. As I will explain, I have always been concerned with trying to give back to the participants and generally to the people who helped me with my research. Gatekeeper A was taking a lot more time helping me than I had anticipated, which made me feel even more indebted to them. The second concern, encapsulated in the above quote, was that I was missing out on an introductory contact with the participants, in which I had intended to explain my research and the life story method so that participants would know what to expect when I came to see them. However, I was aware that not being able to introduce myself would impact on the stories I collected as it transpired participants only had a vague idea of why they were meeting me. I had to spend some time at the beginning of each interview explaining in more detail what the project was about, which was not always conducive to people sharing their life stories. In particular, I had hoped to put people in the position of experts, but several felt put off by the fact that I did not have a list of set questions and I was often told “If you had questions, that would help.” In my first interviews, even when I was asking questions, I felt people had a certain agenda and were not actually answering the questions I had asked, but telling me about what they had anticipated I wanted to hear before they had met me, based on what the gatekeeper had told them (and I guess previous experiences of having been interviewed). I learnt that if I could not explain to participants in an introductory phone call that I would like them to talk freely about their life stories, I needed to have some relevant prompting questions to help them
with their reflection. Also, I decided to spend more time at the beginning of each interview going over the purpose of what I was doing.
Circumstances also helped me to adapt to the situation. The time of year (Christmas was just around the corner) and life events (I had to take on part-time work to carry on funding my studies, which delayed doing more interviews, although I carried on being involved in the area; Gatekeeper A took time off work due to ill health) gave me the opportunity to renegotiate my relationship with Gatekeeper A. As Gatekeeper A was stepping back due to their health, I was able to suggest I could organise the interviews myself, to which Gatekeeper A agreed. Following on from this change in the process of recruitment, I noticed an improvement in the way people behaved towards me and in the progress of the interviews. In addition, after several unsuccessful attempts at making my own contacts with other organisations in Billesley, I finally got a positive response from a faith organisation. I was able to recruit a different type of people and also to learn from previous experience and be much clearer about what I needed from gatekeeper B.
Impact on sampling
As I only managed to establish a relationship with two organisations, most of the people I interviewed are related to either one of them, be it the church or the community organisation. This has implications in terms of analysis and I recorded in my transcript to which organisations participants were linked and in what way (for example, volunteer, attendant, or trustee) to be able to put their comments into context.
In reality, my attempts at recruiting participants through snowballing were marginally successful. Several people promised to mention my research to their friends, saying they would rather give their friends my number than pass on their friends’ contact details, but despite chasing people up, few called back. In the end, only two of the interviews I conducted were with participants who had been recommended to me by another interviewee.
Overall, I conducted interviews with 18 participants. 12 were linked to the community organisation whilst the remaining 6 were introduced to me through faith organisation. I interviewed all but 3 of them once, and each interview typically lasted 90 minutes (although the shortest was just 30 minutes and the longest two and a half hours). In the three cases13 where I was able to carry out a follow-up interview, the second meeting took place within two weeks of the first one and only after I had transcribed the first interview to be able to ask clarification and expansion on certain points and ensure I was not going to repeat questions. In terms of demographic profile, I interviewed eight women and ten men. Ten participants were “White British” (six women; four men), three were “Pakistani first generation” (one woman; two men), four “Pakistani second generation” (one woman; three men) and one man was “British Afro-Caribbean.” Their ages varied considerably, with the youngest interviewee being 28 at the time of recording and the oldest 92. However, it is noticeable that the “White British” participants tended to be older (e.g. two were 82; three were 73) than the “Pakistani second generation” (all in late 20s and early 30s). At the time of the narration, eleven of the participants were living in Billesley. All of the participants had however spent most of or all of their childhood in the area. Further biographical notes on each participant can be found in Appendix 4.
Process of interviewing
The literature on research interviews makes it very clear that interviewing is a skill and that it can improve with reflective practice. After each interview, I created an entry in my research diary to reflect on what went well and what I could have improved. It appeared that eliciting life stories is not always straightforward and people reacted to it in different ways. Some people felt very comfortable with the idea of sharing their lives, whereas others were put off by the lack of structure of the interview. Riessman (2008) warns that “some participants may not want to develop lengthy accounts of experiences with a stranger; the assumption that there is a story wanting to be told can put pressure on participants.” (25) It is something
13I was able to interview Elizabeth, Ilham and Mahmoud twice.
that I became gradually aware of and that I had to develop mechanisms to adapt to.
For example, I had to acknowledge that asking people “Tell me your life story,”
which I had hoped would put them in the position of experts about the topic, could be daunting and I developed a series of more detailed questions that I started using to begin the interviews. I began by asking people to tell me when and where they were born and to then tell me anything they wanted about their childhood in the area. I told them they could talk as little or as much as they wanted. I warned them that I would be jotting down some notes if any questions came to my mind about the topics they raised. In this sense, most of the interviews developed as a conversation between the participants and me, with an emphasis on the participants’ stories. If it did not come up in the conversation or if the participants explicitly required that I asked questions, I prompted people to describe Billesley as it was when they were growing up there and whether/how it has changed over the years. After they had finished telling me their story as they wanted to and I had asked follow-up questions, I systematically encouraged them to describe the area now and asked them what they thought of it today.14 Depending on whether they still lived in the area or not, I tried to find out how long they had lived in Billesley and if there was a specific reason why they had left or stayed. I typically closed the interviews with three questions: do you have any hopes for the future of Billesley?
And any concerns? Is there anything I have not asked about that you would like to add?
At this point, I also want to reflect on how people seemed to perceive and position me during the interviews, as this undoubtedly shaped what they told me. First, having detected my unusual accent when we conversed, people were curious about my origins and tended to ask me about where I was from in France, what I was doing in the UK and how I liked it here. Thus, they were aware that I was an
“outsider,” although I was also very clear about the fact that I had lived in Bradford
14To do so, I asked such question as: Is there anything different or unique about Billesley? What are the good points about the area? And, if any, the negative ones? Do you feel attached to the area or not?
for a while. As a result, people made a number of assumptions about what I knew not so much about Billesley, but about Bradford itself. This was an issue and I tried to follow-up on the assumptions they were making as I specifically wanted them to talk about how they understood the city. Considering we were talking about areas within Bradford, I was also asked whereabouts in Bradford I lived (in the outskirts) and this also prompted a series of interesting comments. The area where I lived at the time has a “good” reputation within the city and participants showed signs of this common understanding, as this person did: “So you’ve got used to Bradford, and you know... And you’re on the... sort of...nice side of Bradford really, well on the more open side going towards the moors...” It clearly contributed to how they positioned me. In sum, I believe I was perceived as a foreign student (I was asked about the PhD and university on a regularly basis) with a strong interest in the UK (I was also quizzed about my “good” English accent, which made me share my own story of settling into this country and my interest for its language and culture), who lived in a “nice” area of Bradford. Although an outsider, most people knew I had lived in Bradford for several years and they assumed I had a certain knowledge of the city, although perhaps not of Billesley. Occasionally, I believe I was positioned differently, which I will flag up in the analysis.
Finally, in several interviews, there were signs that how I perceived them mattered to the participants, a clear aspect of the co-construction of narratives. For example, as “ethnicity” came up in conversations, some participants were keen to ensure I did not think they were racist with comments such as “They just didn’t have immigration then, and they were just, I don’t like saying this, it makes you feel racist, but there were just our people, ” “The area then was not like it is now, and I don’t mean it in any sort of prejudicial way, but the area has changed quite a lot” or
“Unfortunately you don’t see anything like that. I’m not racist, I’m not prejudiced or anything. But since the Eastern Europeans came in, it changed a lot.” Thus, how the participants perceived me mattered in the construction of the narrative, but also in how they thought I perceived them.