Questionnaires and Interview

Questionnaires

Brief questionnaires were used in this dissertation for three primary reasons:

1. Demographic data about the participants in the research was yielded by the

questionnaires. This dissertation examines the qualitative aspects of the data yielded and does not necessarily reflect more generally the responses and characteristics of the group from which the participants come (de Vaus, 1986: 52). Susan Krieger, in

discussing social scientists’ use of auto/biography in their work, concludes that the readers of social research ‘have become increasingly dissatisfied with the tone of remote authority commonly used in the writing of social science’ (1991: 47). This may also apply to writing in which the participants themselves are not individualised. The

demographic information was used to individualise the responses of the participants, and to provide context for their narratives. James’ response, for example, was examined in the context of his self-identification as a gay man, affluent and twenty-eight years of age as an individualised personal narrative. Part of the aim of this dissertation was to identify various narratives in the personal lives of the participants by using

demographic information to contextualise their experiences. The contextualising of the participants experiences was based on the ‘understanding that participants in social life actively produce a context for what they do and that social researchers should not simply import their own about what context is relevant in any situation’ (Silverman, 1993: 8).

2. The interviews were conducted according to the method of interactive interviewing,

‘an interpretive practice for getting an in-depth and intimate understanding of people’s experiences with emotionally-charged and sensitive topics’ (Ellis, et al., 1997: 121). As the interviewer, I attended to my own feelings and experiences during the interviews to assess validity and bias (Laslett & Rapoport, 1975; Hertz, 1995; Jorgenson, 1995; Miller, 1996). As Shulamit Reinharz explains, ‘the self we create in the field is a product of the norms of the social setting and the ways in which the ‘research subjects’ interact with the selves the researcher brings to the field’ (1997: 3). Consistent with the rationale stated above (Reinharz, 1997) I wanted to avoid positioning an overarching

researcher’s self in the middle of every interview which could influence the participants’

view of how they should respond. At the same time, the researcher’s self was

sublimated in the initial stages of the interview process in order to avoid positioning it centrally.

3. The questionnaires were used as a basis for the unstructured interviews. The questionnaires revealed which pieces of literature the participants would be able to discuss in the context of the participants having some knowledge of the texts listed in the questionnaire. The questionnaires were designed to encourage the participants to reflect on representations of intimate relationships in English-language fictional and non-fictional literature, and how various pieces of literature have affected their own narratives. The purpose of this part of the interview process was to illustrate that

‘when the reader reads a biographical text, that text is read through the life of the

reader. Hence writers and readers conspire to create the lives they write and read about’ (Denzin, 1989: 26). As Denzin (1989) suggests, when an individual reads a text, fictional or non-fictional, the narratives of the writer and reader may become entangled (Roth, 1988; Lesser, 1988). This part of the interview process examined this

entanglement.

The Interviews

Interactive interviewing was used in this study as a method of gaining rich data from the participants on topics that the participants found sensitive and emotionally confronting (Ellis et al., 1997: 121). The effect of the interviewer in this interactive process was also considered. The ‘interpretive practice’ (Ellis et al., 1997: 121) of interactive interviewing problematises ‘value-free scientific inquiry’ (Ellis et al., 1997:

121; Roberts, 1981; Cook & Fonow, 1986; Reinharz, 1992). According to this practice, the ongoing relationship of the interviewer and the interviewees is understood as a process in which ‘the social identities of both interviewers and interviewees continually change as each responds to the other’ (Ellis et al., 1997: 123). This practice

accommodates the changing thoughts and feelings of the interviewer and interviewees over time, an approach favoured to garner a more diachronic sense of life story

(Plummer, 2010). In addition, follow-up interviews were conducted with four of the ten original interviewees nearly ten years later. The rationale here was to examine how their ‘stories’ (Plummer, 1995) may have changed over this extended period. In combination with its form of story-telling, this form of ‘biographical ethnography’

(Stanley, 1993: 57) allows for the constant forming and re-forming of the direction of the research, ‘in line with the changing assessments of what is required by the process of theory construction’ (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1997: 24). Using this method, it was possible to examine the ways in which the interviewer’s and interviewees’ attitudes towards various pieces of literature, as well as their attitudes to their intimate relationships, changed over time (Jorgenson, 1991, 1995).

The rationale for this type of interviewing was based on the idea that ‘biographical ethnography can aid the steering of a course ‘between the over-determinism of some varieties of socialisation theory, and the opposite extreme of seeing selves as extremely unique individuals which are the product of inner psychological processes’’ (Stanley,

1993: 2,). Rather than seeing the participants in this study as only the product of their

‘inner worlds,’ an attempt was made to unravel their personal narratives and the narratives that they have vicariously experienced, and possibly engaged, in Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain (2006), Quan’s Calendar Boy (2001) and Conigrave’s Holding the Man (1995). Coffey describes this approach as being at once able to uncover the

‘intertextual links between reality and representations of reality’ (1999: 132) as well as conceptualise the ‘’life’ or ‘lives’’ as the product of biographies that are inextricably interwoven and networked’ (1999: 132). This dissertation presents the lives of the interviewees as biographical constructions in the same way that narrative analysis examined the biographies of the characters in the fictional and non-fictional literature.

The interview process itself progressed through the following stages in succession:

1. Once the individual participants had completed the preliminary procedures including the questionnaires, they were asked to participate in a non-standardised interview, the duration of which was approximately one hour.

2. After the initial interview, the participants were given a copy of the set-text, Holding the Man (Conigrave, 1995) and asked to read it, or – if they had already read it – to reserve their responses to the text until a second interview.

3. At the second interview, participants were asked to consider in depth their response to the set text. A detailed discussion of the questions asked of the participants follows in a later chapter.