Selecting Interviewees

The selection of the ten interviewees consisted of contacting members from the adoption community that I belong to. I belong to two ‘Facebook groups’16 _{which has two} closed social support groups for adult adoptees, only accessible by invitation. These sites

16 _{Facebook is a social networking website, that was founded and launched on February 4, 2004, by}

Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard College roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It is now a multi-national conglomerate organisation and business. See

74 are only open to UK residents. The monitoring of the sites is on a regular daily basis by the administrators for the groups. You must be invited to the groups and then accepted or declined by the administration members. Any information and posts on the sites are only able to be seen by invited members. The sites are also monitored regularly by Facebook administration, adhering to equality and diversity policies and non-discriminatory behaviour. The groups currently have a total of over a thousand members in each group.

An advert was posted on the forum groups, explaining the research, with a contact email for prospective participants to contact the researcher. The participant criteria were: UK residents only; adult adoptees of any gender orientation or identity; fluent in written and verbal English; aged over 25 years; and feeling sufficiently grounded in their experience to be able to participate safely. The criteria were agreed and developed in line with the research aims and to meet ethical practice (see section 3.1& 3.3.2). The reason to state 25 years and over, as opposed to 18 years (which is the standard age criteria in the UK for an adult), was deemed, through the ethics committee’s criteria, that a 25-year-old adult would be potentially more mature and sufficiently grounded in experience than perhaps an 18-year-old, due to the sensitivity of the subject area of sexuality and self- identity.

After initial email contact with the participant, the participant was contacted by telephone to arrange the interview. The participant was then emailed an information sheet (see Appendix 1) explaining the process of the interview, the limits of confidentiality, the process of data analysis, and five sub-questions acting as thematic prompts (see Table 2) to assist and start a reflexive process in the participant.

3.7.1 The Interview Process

The process of interviewing was used as a method, to gain access to and gather adult adoptee’s personal narratives/stories around the subject of their sexuality, their

75 sexual identity and their adoption. The five sub-questions (see Table 2) acted as an initial reflexive stimulus, and then as guiding prompts for the interview.

Table 2 - 5 sub-questions for interview 5 Sub-questions

How do you understand your sexuality? What does your sexuality mean to you?

Is your self-identity connected to your sexuality?

Do you see any correlation between being adopted and your sexuality?

Is there anything else you might want to say? Possibly about your adoptive process.

Coming from a person-centred/relational perspective in my therapeutic work, it felt a natural process to facilitate the interviewee in this way, although there was a greater focus on a conversational dialogical process, which Moustakas (1990) claims, ‘involves cooperative sharing in which co-researchers and primary researchers open pathways to each other’ (p.47), with an emphasis on self-expression, disclosure and revealing of the phenomena being researched. After the interview had been transcribed, the participant was sent a copy of the interview transcript to check for accuracy, and for any changes or deletions the participant wished to make.

Participant Cathy was the only participant to make changes and deleted the conversation where she had explicitly talked about personal sexual acts.

76

3.7.2 The experience of being interviewed

Embracing the inter-subjective relationship between the researcher and participant in interviewing, ‘There is a reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other,’ says Merleau-Ponty (1968, p. 138); as researcher and participant intermingle in ‘pre-analytic participation’ (1968, p. 203), each touches and impacts on the other. This explicitly relational approach to collecting research data is seen to emerge out of the researcher/participant relationship, and is understood to be co-created in the embodied dialogical encounter (Finlay, 2009).

A vivid and emerging process that demonstrates this dialogical approach is seen through the account of participant Marty and our interview (see Table 3):

Table 3 - Marty's interview process Interview process

Interviewer That deeper understanding to make sense maybe or why we experience what we experience

Marty Hmmmmmm. What it made me think about first and foremost was you have in some religious and spiritual traditions, you have icons, saints

Interviewer Yes saints yeah

Marty And you're supposed to kind of focus on the icon in a kind of connect with the bigger thing behind it God. So is that what happened with the older woman, if the older woman is an icon like the mother, by not addressing the mother everything else is, it becomes spiritual

Interviewer It becomes the divine feminine.

Marty Yeah yeah that's what I think. I am asking myself. Asking for some divine fantasy?

Interviewer The need to just be at one with it. To connect with it, to know it? Marty Yeah. Yeah I'm kind of like that's interesting to be at one with it,

hmmmm but yeah would she be what we want her to be, or is it…you get so close actually you find out that she has her own sort of conditions and thinking.

77 Interviewer Hmmmm, the conditional divine mother that we are lost to…

Through this ‘snapshot’ of our dialogue in Table 3, we see a dialogical and co- created process unfolding, relating to our understanding and sense making of our relationship to our mothers. In this co-created ‘meaning making’, we are sharing and co- creating symbolic representation of our relinquishment and adoption, and how this has presented itself in our lives through our shared sexual attraction to older women (continued in Table 4).

Table 4 - Marty's interview cont... Interview contin…

Marty And sort of the divine feminine is also quite stern you know; she has standards. I remember doing a workshop once that was around rebirthing. It kind of took me right back to my birth and some of those early powers of my life. The facilitator was an older woman. I was feeling so horny for her. I had this sense that I’d got in touch with this essential feminine this divine feminine within and yet something made me feel incredibly

powerfully attracted to this woman, but we couldn't have sex, we couldn't make love, we couldn't do anything with that.

Interviewer It was just there

Marty It was just there it was like that sense of society was saying you can't. That's not what you do with this divine feminine. You need it but that's not what you do with it. That would've been in aberration in a way. Interviewer Transgression, we must not overstep the boundary.

Marty So, it's like the divine feminine is in our world view of our experience. This beautiful nurturing all-encompassing energy but actually they're still boundaries there.

This process was also shared and related through the other participants. Participant Pan questioned his understanding regarding his need to take the ‘path of least

78 resistance’, which made me question my own ability to conform and adapt for acceptance and fear of rejection. Participant Cathy was thankful for the interview space to finally make the time to get in-touch with her ‘repressed and denied sexuality’, allowing an opportunity to share her experience, making the initial step to connect with her ‘sexual self’.

McLeod (2011) claims, ‘The act of making testimony is a fundamental human need.’ (p.217); this was found through the interview process with the participants. Participant Kim, Participant Noel and I, all felt the interview process had given us a moment in time to ‘voice’ and re-evaluate our adoption journey, and how that now related to our current relationships. Participant Eva was encouraging and supportive of the research endeavour, saying, ‘this area of adoption is well overdue, especially for lesbians and gay people’, being thankful for the opportunity to be heard. This was also expressed by Participant David and Participant Sam after the interview; although questions were raised when they were both contacted to ‘check their transcripts’ a few weeks later, both expressed a need to move on, and didn’t feel the need to check, being happy with our initial process. This does confirm Riessman (2008) who highlights the possible illusions, to ‘giving voice’ to marginalised research groups with the need of the participants to feel connected and heard. She claims researchers can often be disillusioned on the ‘healing power of storytelling’ (p.199), warning us that emancipatory intentions are no assurance of emancipatory effects.

However, overall the general consensus felt that the interview experience had given them an opportunity to reflect and consider the subject of their sexuality as an adult adoptee.