Each interview lasted approximately two hours and was recorded onto a Dictaphone. The women were encouraged to talk freely about their experiences and were guided by a small number of questions. The women were asked about their first experiences of motherhood, their reasons for pursuing a PhD, how the PhD was managed in relation to their other responsibilities, their relationship with their supervisor, support throughout the process and the role of the university. The researcher, as a lecturer and mother of two young children, was concerned about the length of time it would take to transcribe 35 interviews. As has been demonstrated in the pilot study, studying part-time leads to a lack of uninterrupted time to work, which would have made transcribing very difficult and time consuming. There was a concern that it would delay the study and the researcher was keen to get an updated account of the women’s situations 9 – 12 months after the first interview. The transcripts would be a written account of how the women felt at that point in time and would provide a point of reference and a document for comparison for the women moving forward. It was therefore important for the study that the transcripts were completed within a timeframe of six months. This would allow the researcher time to re-read them all whilst listening to the interviews prior to contacting the women again. The researcher secured research funding from two research committees at her place of work to pay for a transcription service to complete transcription of all 35 interviews.
In not completing the transcription herself, the researcher acknowledges she has not benefitted from the immersion into the data that transcribing work oneself allows. To counteract this, the researcher listened back over the interviews whilst reading the transcription line by line. This was of great use to the researcher, the transcription was checked for accuracy and the interview data was reviewed a second time before the analysis began. As it is virtually impossible to completely capture the meaning from an interview when transcribing, the more detailed a transcription is, the more clues are provided for interpretation and analysis (Eliott 2009:51).
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Each participant was then sent a copy of their transcribed interview to allow them to check that the transcription was a true account of what was said (Andrews et al. 2009). As the interview is a ‘forced introspective’ it may not always be a positive experience to recount what was said and the researcher was mindful of this when providing transcripts, allowing the women as much time as they required to read through the full account of their interview (Miller 2000: 104). However, in showing the women their transcripts, it allows them to comment on the accuracy as transcriptions can be interpretative practices and it was important that the women felt the transcription was an accurate reflection of the interview (Reissman 2008). It also demonstrates transparency and openness between the researcher and the interviewee. The women then sent an e-mail to the researcher stating they were satisfied with the transcription and they were still willing to allow their experiences to be included in the study. During this exchange the researcher also clarified the name they would be referred to in the research and provided them with the opportunity to change their name once they had reviewed the transcription.
Many of the women, on reading the transcript, decided to anonymize themselves and the institutions they were involved with. They felt they had been very honest in their interviews, talking very candidly about their experiences and feelings, which led to an aspect of vulnerability, both emotionally and in some cases professionally. To be able to use the interviews without harming the women, their professional standing and their relationships with others, it was decided in many cases to invite the women to provide pseudonyms for themselves, in keeping with them constructing the data of their lives (Graham 1984). In some cases, children’s names, supervisors’ identities and university locations were changed or omitted to ensure the women were not identifiable (King & Horrocks 2010). The researcher considered the various transcription options and whilst clean transcripts are perhaps easier to read, they lose some of the external verbal communication that can provide a deeper insight into the women’s experiences. Therefore, the transcription was literal and included all verbal communication such as pauses, ‘erms’, laughs and regional slang without corrections (Miller 2000). The transcriptions of the narratives evidenced a range of themes common to most of the women participating in the study. To ensure these emerging themes were analysed using
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a clear and structured approach, thematic narrative analysis was adopted to identify any patterns of themes from interview transcriptions. The following section details this approach.
5.10 Thematic Narrative analysis
‘Narratives are based on life and life is expressed, articulated and modified in stories’ (Josselson & Lieblich 1993:9). The stories or narratives of the mothers in this study were considered by identifying patterns or themes within what they said. This provided an understanding of the experiences of the women as a cohort, as the individual narratives were linked by common themes within their experiences of being part-time PhD students. The analysis of the interviews for a narrative study usually requires the stories of each woman told separately (Kohler Reissman 2008). However, as the purpose of this thesis was to understand all of the women’s experiences collectively, it was felt that an interpretivist study would be more appropriate so that the lived experiences of the women could be combined together to provide a universal essence of experience (Cresswell 2007). Structural narrative analysis can provide insights that may be missed if the interpretation of narrative concentrates on ‘what’ is said without heed to how the speaker organizes the content (Kohler Reissman 2008). Narrative analysis considers the story as a whole rather than thematic narrative analysis which is looking at component themes across a number of cases, considering what is said rather than the wider context of how, to whom or why (Kohler Reissman 2008). Although this study will explore individual women’s experiences, it is expected that their narratives will not be confined to meaning for the individuals but will provide possibilities for group belonging and collective action. (Kohler Reissman 2008). Therefore, this study will adopt thematic narrative analysis to provide an ‘experience-centered approach’ (Squire 2008:42).