During October of 2019, I sent an online questionnaire for international students with the sup- port of the Student Union and IT Administration services of the University of Oulu. The first purpose of this questionnaire was to collect data for my first research report regarding psycho- logical well-being services of the University of Oulu (OYY, 2019). The second purpose was to call participants for this study. Then, at different times between mid-October and the end of November 2019, eight research participants voluntarily contacted me via e-mail or personally. Even though narrative inquiry does not favor any particular method of gathering data (Trahar, 2009), I found that open-ended and participant-led interviews would allow me to collect the stories or field texts (Ollerenshaw and Creswell, p. 332) of this thesis, adding the same im- portance to feelings, hunches and conversations in the non-formal spaces such as corridors of the University (Trahar, 2009), or even a simple walk. Before each interview, there was a prep- aration stage. First, participants reached me after they had answered the questionnaire “Support Mental Well-being Services for International Students” (previously discussed in Chapter 2), where I had invited international students to participate in this thesis through this statement:
53 Would you like to participate in a Master’s thesis research concerning mental well-being of interna- tional Students? if so, please contact (researcher’s student e-mail contact).
Participants and I would communicate via e-mail. After agreeing on a day and time for the interview, held in my temporal office at the OYY, I sent students the following questions as a guide for the interview:
Can you draw a timeline depicting events that were important in your student path through University of Oulu? (This is optional and depends more on the participants, only if you find it helpful you can do it before the interview or take some minutes in the beginning of the interview)
Can you identify positive moments related to your mental well-being? What about challenging moments in relation to your mental well-being?
Can you identify who/which were the support people services/ strategies that helped you overcome these challenging situations?
I also invited the participants to freely draw a timeline of their experiences, identifying these positive or challenging moments throughout their studies. Even though these pre-set require- ments helped to guide the interviews, they did not determine the flow of the interview session unless the participants would ask for it.
The interview sessions were held face-to-face, in a quiet room at the OYY. In each session, I would begin the interview explaining the personal reasons for doing this thesis, starting a dia- logue where I would follow the participants’ topic of conversation. I also introduced them the consent form so as to formally guarantee their anonymity and presenting the general purpose of narrative inquiry as the methodology: to listen to their stories.
The letter of consent described the thesis as a ‘research project’, since it has been embedded with the research internship that I carried out in Autumn 2019 at the OYY. The consent form explained the methodology and aims of the research, informing participants of the confidenti- ality, anonymity, and the possibility of freely withdrawing from this research at any stage (see appendix 1). All of them signed and agreed to participate in this thesis before the start of the interview.
It was interesting to notice that, same as myself, research participants were international stu- dents from outside of European Union countries. Students belonged to diverse faculties and programs of the University of Oulu, which was an asset for me as a researcher so as to count
54 with diverse views and experiences. For the purpose of respecting students’ anonymity, I will not describe personal characteristics, or master program that students belonged to, only facul- ties that have been named. I do not address specifically their time living in Finland, but only those who were first year students. Master studies from faculties of Architecture, Business School, ICT (Information and communications technology), Education and Engineering were represented by the eight participants. Six of the participants were female, and two were male. To ensure anonymity and confidentiality, I used pseudonyms for their stories. I have blurred all the students’ personal information in the three drawings that have been attached to this thesis (see appendices 2,3,4). Nonetheless, it is important to mention that all the pseudonyms chosen to have a personal meaning of how I perceived their stories, and all participants have kindly agreed on their pseudonyms.
During the interview sessions, my personal aim was to create a safe space where trust would guide the dialogue and conversation with the participants. My purpose was that participants could feel relaxed and open for sharing their story. As for me, acknowledging that listening to psychological well-being stories was an uncertain route and a personal challenge, I found in- terpretative poetics as a suitable method to apply during the interview sessions. Underpinned by Psychoanalysis, interpretative poetics enabled me, throughout the interview sessions, to il- luminate the experience of the unconscious, focusing on language, negativity, the silences in speech and the unsayable (Rogers, 2007, p.109). Even though the field texts —research partic- ipants’ stories data— will not be analysed through psychoanalytic lens, interpretative poetics helped to locate myself, and reflect on my questions in the following way:
“Thus the questions are formed by the researcher in relation to how I read the subject addressing me, listening for the limits of what can be said consciously and responding in both conscious and unconscious aspects of language” (Rogers, 2007, p.109).
Therefore, to inform myself during the interviewing time, I drew on story threads and language of the unsayable as two of the interpretative layers. The story threads layer illuminated how the process of narrating is intrinsically connected with knitting stories, stories that are told to communicate through spoken language. On the other hand, the layer of language of the unsay- able made me aware that beyond speaking, communication involves negations, revisions, and silences which need to be heard (Rogers, 2007, p.109).
In this sense, during the interviews I tried to listen actively and carefully respecting the mo- ments of silence in the stories. Certain highlights of the participants’ stories could be later
55 recovered, only in the last part of the interview, but I would not interrupt their experiences. Only when participants would require so, I would follow the list of questions of positive, challenging moments and coping strategies and support they found at the University.
5.3.2 Data analysis: Three-Dimensional Space approach and creative analytic practice