Everyday Courage. Niobe Way
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seemed the most effective in helping me sort, categorize, thematize, and understand the piles of data lying on my office floor. The methods, which I will describe below, were “The Listening Guide”;6 narrative summaries;7 and a content analysis using conceptually clustered matrices.8 As most qualitative researchers do, I revised slightly each method to fit this particular project. The integration of three revised methods, each emphasizing different aspects of the text, allowed me a detailed examination of the interview data.
“The Listening Guide”
“The Listening Guide,” a method created by Lyn Mikel Brown, Carol Gilligan, and their colleagues, highlights the multilayered nature of people’s experiences of self and their relationships as conveyed through interviews.9 This method underscores and draws out the complexity of voice and of relationships by paying close attention to the language used by the interviewees. It attunes the reader’s ear to what is being said and also, perhaps, to what is not being said. Moreover, it stresses the relational nature of interviewing, analyzing, and interpreting narratives.
“The Listening Guide” involves a sequence of four readings, each focusing on a different theme or voice. In the first part of my analysis, I undertook the first two readings, and in the latter part, after I created the narrative summaries and the conceptually clustered matrices, I conducted a revised version of the latter readings. The first reading in “The Listening Guide” focuses on how the narrator tells her or his story. As the reader, I sought to understand the story being told by the interviewee by listening for the “who, what, when, where and why of the story.”10 In this first reading, I also listened for and recorded contradictions or inconsistencies as well as repeated words or images. I looked for places in which there appeared to be absences or revisions. I also recorded the ways in which I responded to the narrator and the story being told, and I thought about the ways these responses affected my interpretations and understanding of the person being interviewed.
In the second reading, I listened to, examined, and recorded the ways in which the narrators spoke about themselves. I became attuned to “the voice of the ‘I’ speaking in the story”11 by locating the references to self throughout the adolescents’ stories (e.g., “I am outspoken” or “I am always worrying about my mother”). Without using preexisting categories to determine self-perspective, the second reading invites the reader to listen to the narrators on their own terms: What are they saying when they refer to themselves? How are they describing themselves? Together, these first two readings enabled me to listen and respond to the adolescents’ stories of self and relationship.
Narrative Summaries
After these first two readings, I created narrative summaries of each topic within the interviews. Barbara Miller, in her study of adolescent friendships, created this method as a way to preserve the natural storyline and the context of the adolescents’ relationships.12 According to Miller, the two most important features of the method are that it accentuates “the elements by which we understand something as a story,” and it reduces the data to a more manageable quantity.13 Narrative summaries involve three steps: (1) the determination of a narrative; (2) a summary of that narrative; and (3) the exploration of all the gathered narrative summaries to find evidence of similar themes.
Miller defines a narrative as a story based on an adolescent’s personal experience, such as a relationship or a particular event. The story may have a beginning, a middle, and an end, or it may be a history of a relationship without a clearly definable beginning, middle, or end. The summary of the narrative is meant to be a condensation of the story. Miller suggests using direct quotes in the summary in order to maintain the “flavor of the story.” There may be many narrative summaries created from a single interview or only a few, depending on the number of stories the adolescent tells the interviewer. When exploring common themes across the narrative summaries, one can look within an interview, across interviews (if longitudinal), and across individuals.
For my analyses, I created narrative summaries for each topic discussed during the interviews (e.g., self-perspective, relationships with best friend, mothers, fathers, etc.). For example, when Eva spoke about her relationship with her mother, she told me that she and her mother do not get along, and she provided various explanations for these difficulties. I summarized the entire discussion of her relationship with her mother, quoting her as much as possible in my narrative summary of this topic (see Appendixes for an example of a narrative summary).
Conceptually Clustered Matrices
After narrative summaries were created for each topic in the seventy-one interviews, I created conceptually clustered matrices in order to detect themes across and within narrative summaries. Miles and Huberman suggest this matrix technique as a way to consolidate and present the data.14 The conceptually clustered matrix has a simple respondent by topic (or variable) format. All the topics in a matrix are conceptually related to each other. For example, I created a matrix for the general conceptual category “relationships with peers”; within this matrix the topics were relationship with best or close friend(s), and with boyfriend or girlfriend. Beneath each topic, I placed the three narrative summaries for that particular topic (representing each year of the interview) to the right of each adolescent’s pseudonym. For example, next to Marie’s name and under the topic “relationship with best friend,” one would find three entries summarizing her relationship with her best friend for each year she was interviewed (see Appendix B for an example). I created separate matrices for each of the five general conceptual categories: (1) self-perspectives; (2) relationships with family members; (3) relationships with peers; (4) perspectives on school; and (5) views on the larger society.
From these matrices, I detected themes across narrative summaries. Themes were repeated phrases, terms, or concepts that I heard within and across narrative summaries. For instance, when the adolescents spoke each year about their fears of betrayal by close friends, I considered betrayal a theme within the topic “relationships with close or best friends.” When the girls spoke about being outspoken in their relationships in and out of school, I considered this a theme across the topics of relationships with friends, family members, and school. In addition, I also went back to my notes taken during the initial two readings of each interview (the first two readings in the analysis based on “The Listening Guide”). I used these notes along with the conceptually clustered matrices to determine the central themes in the data. Those themes that were evident in half or more of the interviews in any one year were considered common themes. I then searched for evidence of each common theme in the original interview transcript of each participant.
“The Listening Guide” Revisited
Reading for specific themes is an approach based loosely on “The Listening Guide”’s third and fourth readings. In the original version of the Guide, the third and fourth readings consist of reading for voices of justice and care. However, my analysis was data rather than theory driven and, therefore, I did not read for such voices. Instead, I read for the common themes detected in the conceptually clustered matrices and the first two readings of the interview texts. I read the interviews searching for the location of where and how frequently each common theme emerged in the adolescents’ interviews. The conceptually clustered matrices offer only a rough outline of this information. Unlike the two previous methods, “The Listening Guide” focuses on both the narratives’ content or what was said, and on the form or how it was said. Reading becomes a process whereby the reader listens not only for evidence of a theme, but also for points where the theme is revised, drops away, or is conspicuously absent. The reader highlights each theme with a colored pen, creating a trail of evidence indicating where and how frequently a particular theme emerges in the text. I, as the reader, look for the nuances in the theme and the places where the theme is not as clear as it is in the other parts of the text. As I discussed in the previous chapter, I attempted to remain aware of the interplay between who I am, what my expectations are, and what I see and hear in the adolescents’