The process of analysing multiple interview transcripts involves decisions about what is noticed, selected and the ways in which it is presented. “An investigator sits with pages of tape-‐recorded stories, snips away at the flow of talk to make it fit between the covers of a book, and tries to create sense and dramatic tension” (Riessman 2002a: 226). While necessary, selecting excerpts from the transcripts risks losing context and the participant’s voice. To minimise this, participant quotations generally include the complete response as well as my questions and responses. The excerpts remain largely faithful to the telling and are not reduced to cleaned and minimised selections of the most significant words and sentences.
Participants’ representations of their experiences offer various analytical treatments. I followed van Manen’s guidance about the identification of themes that relate to the phenomenon under study (1990: 87-‐88). The researcher must be reflexively aware that analysis is happening throughout the interviewing, transcribing, formal analysis (such as coding) and writing stages. Transcripts were read line by line. Participant responses and stories were interrogated for their thematic meaning. The themes were identified and the transcripts annotated accordingly. This was a personal process and I
identified the themes without reference to other studies, trying as much as possible to bracket my presuppositions and biases. I undertook the coding exercise during a two week visit to a remote part of the Tasmanian southwest world heritage area, where I was usually alone and able to immerse myself in the transcripts. This of course, was not the only time I revisited the transcripts or the coding, but it seemed appropriate to do the main work in a natural environment, rather than an office with the attendant distractions of university and domestic life.
Many stories offered multiple meanings and themes. Decisions had to be made about what was most relevant to the research question. This sometimes meant that interesting lines of inquiry would not be followed during the preparation of this thesis. Take the following narrative about the experience of tree-‐sitting. Earlier in the interview, Sophie was telling me about how living in the bush helps her maintain a connection to nature, something she found very difficult in Melbourne. I asked her what feeling connected is like:
Sophie It’s just the same as when I hang out with a friend, it’s not really any different, including like probably the conversations that I have out loud, and probably get different responses from a river or a tree.
John I’d be really interested in any stories you might have about relationships you’ve formed, or when you’ve spoken to it and it’s spoken back, or whatever? Sophie Well, I sat up one tree. That one tree I was climbing up and down it every day, and would climb up at night and get down at maybe six pm the next day. So I was always climbing up at night, and then sitting throughout the day, and there was no one else around. It was just me sitting in this tree. How long it was for? It was for quite a while I did that. And definitely the relationship I was having with that tree was probably more real than any other relationship I was having with people who I was seeing for maybe two hours a day.
And I had a fellow tree-‐sitter who was also going through the same experience; she was like 50 metres away or something. We’d occasionally yell out to each other, but we’d both get down the same time and walk back to
camp. So yeah at the end of that experience we were both talking to each other, and she said to me, “I know this is going to sound crazy but I talk to my tree and he talked back.” And it’s like, “I know, I did the same thing.”
Yeah, I guess in terms of actual words that’s not actually how it felt, it didn’t feel like it was saying, “Hi, my name is.” It wasn’t like that, it was more like there were thought processes going through my head all the time, because what else am I going to do? I might as well think. And I was getting answers that didn’t feel like they were coming from me.
John Right. Gosh, how interesting.
Sophie And yeah I guess a lot of people would just go, “that’s just because you had the time and the space to sit there and delve into parts of your brain that you probably not ever have time or space to.” I think I was getting up a very old tree that had a lot of stuff to share and he felt like he could share it with me. This is a powerful and rich narrative, which, in a few sentences, reveals much about the lived experience of forest activism and connection with nature. Sophie spends each day in the same tree-‐sit in the expectation that loggers and police could arrive suddenly. It is time spent largely alone, although she can make contact with a colleague in a neighbouring tree. They return to camp each evening to join the other activists engaged in the blockade.
Sophie forms a relationship with her tree; it is just her and the tree up there. For Sophie relationships with trees can be like relationships with human friends; non-‐humans can be people too. The enforced stillness gives plenty of time to think and the tree seems to become implicated in her thinking processes.
Both activists seem to experience a shift in their awareness of their tree, radically altering their appreciation of it. The participant’s colleague is self-‐ conscious and aware of the risk she is taking by telling her colleague that she talks to her tree and it “talked back”, something that is clearly not normal. She prefaces her conversation with a phrase that serves the
function of both warning her colleague and asking to be taken seriously, not dismissed. Sophie affirms her colleague’s experience. She then qualifies her story to me (perhaps because she is worried I would not take her seriously), by trying to provide a rational explanation for an experience that she seems to think is not rational. I wonder whether Sophie’s decision to include her colleague’s experience in the narrative is a way of giving validity to her story.
Sophie’s comment about the tree’s age also seems significant; this is an ancient being that has wisdom. Interestingly, both people assign a masculine gender to the tree, something I missed during the interview that deserves further inquiry. Sophie does not anthropomorphise the tree when she stresses that the tree is not talking like a human, but it might have been useful to probe further. Finally, I am able to anticipate in this excerpt from the interview some of the reasons why Sophie will experience the grief she describes later, when her tree is cut down by loggers.
Sophie has incorporated a wide range of information and ideas into her story and the reader will no doubt identify things that have been missed in my interpretation. For example, I have focussed here on the experiential and affective dimensions of the story, rather than what she does. The focus is on the content rather than a structural analysis (Riessman 2008). I am also aware that I have not yet offered the participants an opportunity to provide feedback about my interpretations of their narratives.
So far this interpretation has been about the visible elements of the narrative. But it is also possible to unearth deeper level meanings. Sophie told this story in response to a question about the experience of connection with nature through the formation of communicative relationships. The way she has told the story, that is, the technical structure and the meaning making involved, provides clues about the way she conceptualises nature. Sophie has told us how, in time, she comes to experience the tree as a non-‐
human person or being, for which she has a lot of respect. With time spent in the tree-‐sit Sophie is no longer a subject ‘I’ relating to an object ‘it’. The tree has become fully subject, and, after Buber, Sophie’s relationship has become subject ‘I’ to subject ‘thou’ (see Buber’s (1970: 57-‐58) account of his contemplation of a tree, of the manifold ways of responding to it, and being drawn into relation with it).
Such an interpretation leads me to think about Sophie’s conceptualisation of nature generally. The story points to a biocentric perspective, in which the tree has inherent moral status as a living entity. Sophie does not tell us whether this was already her perspective of course, but told in this way, the narrative suggests that is the perspective she holds. The story also suggests an animist orientation: she engages with a world of non-‐human persons. Both interpretations provide lines of inquiry that I can pursue throughout Sophie’s transcript, but they also remind me to seek them in the other transcripts.
Finally, the interpretations given to this story were not achieved in the one reading. They emerged through a hermeneutic cycle of reading, analysing, rereading and reanalysing.
Re-‐reading this story I am reminded of Riessman’s statement that, “respondents narrativize particular experiences in their lives, often where there has been a breach between ideal and real, self and society” (Riessman 1993: 3). Experiences such as those Sophie describes, are told with the knowledge that they contradict the social fact of the impossibility of meaningful, reciprocal communication with the non-‐human. As an interviewer I made it clear to participants that I was interested in stories such as these (although my ‘gosh’ is an indication of how surprised I was by Sophie’s story). Even so, in the telling, participants often appeared self-‐ conscious and stated they were careful whom they told about them. For example, Emily told me about a tree that seemed to communicate to some
people that it did not want to be a tree-‐sit (this story is introduced later). These people exercised great caution in telling about this experience. Instead, they gave rational explanations about the decision not to use the tree, reserving discussions about the experience of communication for those who shared the experience, or those she trusted. Re-‐reading the transcripts, I am reminded of the privilege that is being entrusted with stories such as these.
Coding
A thematic analysis was undertaken by identifying themes that seemed to describe something meaningful about the participants’ accounts of their experiences. I coded the above story under the headings relationship/reciprocity, communication, agency, nature familiarity/skills and biocentric attitude. Reducing such a powerful narrative into a handful of themes seems to oversimplify Sophie’s narrative, but as each transcript was coded my confidence grew that I had identified themes that were present in other participants’ descriptions of their experiences and relevant to the conceptual framework. The reductionist approach, therefore, while generating seemingly spare interpretation of an individual interview, enables the researcher to identify the experiential structures of the experience when it is combined with the coding of the other interviews. Thematic coding is a highly subjective process that, guided by the conceptual framework, is dependent to some extent upon the researcher’s interests and state of mind at the time. I found that revisiting the transcripts led to fresh insights and new themes. Achieving rigour was an interplay between disproving the theme and arguing its relevance (its relevance to the research question but also its representation across the interviews). There is also a dialectic between the participants’ voices and the researcher.
Phenomenology as method requires the researcher to bracket, or suspend, their presuppositions and beliefs about the world from the process of interpretation, in an effort to hear faithfully the participant’s voice. This is not easy. Indeed, I found analysing the transcripts thematically the most difficult aspect of the research process. I learned that a reflexive approach is necessary. I also learned, with some considerable difficulty, that one needs flexibility: to stretch my tendency to seek black and white answers, clearly compartmentalised themes when, of course, human experience, meaning making and interpretation are far more complex, nebulous and paradoxical in nature.
Some theme names were renamed to match better the aspect of experience they seemed to represent. Some themes contained more than one related element, whereas other themes expressed an aspect of experience that seemed to stand alone. I became aware that I was identifying different kinds of themes. Some represented aspects of direct experience that were processual in nature and externally implicated such as, for example, connectedness, whereas a small number of others, such as obligation, while also borne from experience and engagement with nature, seemed to be more internally derived. Both are aspects of the experience of being in nature, but they are qualitatively different. The former seems to be more a product of the participant’s sensual engagement with their surroundings, the other places a greater emphasis upon the internal – it comes from within.
Some themes were not retained. For example, early in the transcript analysis a theme called ‘dreams’ was established, because four participants told stories about experiences that included dreams. When no more dream stories were found I decided to dispense with the theme, allocating those stories to themes that represented the content and meaning of the dream stories.
CONCLUSIONS
This chapter has described how the interviews were transcribed and analysed. It has discussed and explained my decisions about the theoretical implications inherent in making decisions about these processes. These decisions have been guided by the inquiry’s conceptual and methodological frameworks, which were illustrated using Sophie’s story about her experience of a communicative relationship with a tree. The next chapter begins the presentation and analysis of the interview data, by exploring the participants’ journeys into activism.