Using extracts from the data

I have used extracts from the data recorded during fieldwork within the body of Chapters 6 to 9 as empirical evidence for the points being made in the thesis. I have tried to provide for the reader some idea of how the empirical data was co-

constructed in social interaction, and so have retained as much as I felt practical my own interventions and action in the conversation. Three types of data extracts have been used in the thesis: transcripts of the video-recordings of project meetings;

39 _{See for instance Section 6.3.1 and the text in which Nina talked about vulnerability. This was}

something of an 'aha!' moment as I felt that she had finally revealed something that helped me piece together the wider picture of what she was having to deal with. Adding this in the first data chapter loses that sense of dramatic denouement that I felt, and weakens the authenticity (Golden- Biddle and Locke, 1993) of the writing in relation to the fieldwork experience.

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transcripts from the recorded exit interviews with individual participants; and informal conversations recorded in fieldnotes. I clarify below how I have presented these three forms of data, and why I chose the presentational style for each.

The extracts from recordings of project meetings and exit interviews have been taken from the original transcripts produced during fieldwork or shortly afterwards, when I was preparing data for uploading into NVivo. I aim to produce a naturalized mode of writing of these texts that allows the reader to follow without too much difficulty the conversation, as in a novel or play's dialogue, while still being sufficiently denaturalized (Bucholz, 2000) to reflect something of the differences in participants' speech styles. Attention has been paid to adding non-verbal elements of interaction - bodily gestures, postures and gazes between participants - in the extracts taken from video recordings where this detail is an important aspect of the analysis, since the reader does not have the same access as I do to the visual component of the video recording.40 For both types of transcript extracts, I have used indentation and closer line spacing than the double spacing of the thesis, in order to highlight the extract from the rest of the text. Speakers are identified by name in the extracts from the project meeting recordings. Where the extracts are taken from the recordings of exit interviews, the speaker's name has usually been omitted, unless the extract contains a series of exchanges between me and the participant, in which case speakers are identified to avoid any confusion.

The third type of data that is used as evidence comes from fieldnotes, used both to set the context and to provide closer detail of informal conversations with

participants. In order to set the contextual scene, there are places in the thesis where I summarise and essentially rewrite the original fieldnote for reasons of word length

40

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and clear narrative progression, where these summaries appear prior to more detailed data extracts.41 I have also used extracts from fieldnotes to offer more fine-grained detail of the informal conversations that took place with research participants, and this detail is presented in two different ways. Firstly, I have used short extracts from the fieldnote of a participant's talk during which there was no interruption from me.42 In this case, I have indented and used closer spacing as per the transcript extracts discussed above, since both types of extracts stand as evidence and illustration for the point being discussed. However, I have always noted in the text the source of the extract so that the reader can be clear on this point. It should be noted that the

extracts from video and audio recordings contain the (audible, replayable)

hesitations, false starts and so on, whereas the extracts from my fieldnotes, that were recorded by hand, do not retain the faltering aspects of communication that might have taken place in the field. In the second use of more detailed fieldnote data, I have kept the data within the main body of the text, without indentation or changes in line spacing. I have done this where the extract is more conversational in style, consisting of exchanges between the research participant and me, primarily because of the awkwardness of trying to find a separate distinguishing presentational style. I wanted to develop and weave in quite a close analysis of the conversational

exchange recorded in the fieldnote but did not want to treat differently my own and the participant's utterances, since they were part of the same sequentially-ordered conversation. Instead of changing the visual style of the text, I have sought instead to represent the distinction between the original fieldnote data and my subsequent analysis of this data firstly through the change in tense - the fieldnote data is in past tense, my analysis in present tense - and, secondly, by being as explicit as possible

41 _{See for instance the beginning of Section 7.1.} 42

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about the source of the data within the chapter section.43 The end product of using these extracts therefore is a less clear visual delineation between the fieldnote and my subsequent interpretative treatment of it in the thesis, and I appreciate that here it may be more difficult to distinguish my own voice from that of my research

participants, and my analysis from the original fieldnote data.44