Cuestionamiento de las (propias) prácticas docentes (id estudiante)

After nearly a month and a half of delays, a female civilian who worked for the constabulary was tasked with recruiting on my behalf. She began calling participants in September 2012, which was the constabulary’s preferred method of contacting participants. Although I was not privy to the conversations she had with potential participants, I had provided the constabulary with a leaflet explaining my research (see Appendix 2), which I asked them to use and to share with those recruiting on my behalf. The leaflet described the research, some details about myself, and that participants would receive £20 as a thank you for their time. This civilian was to explain the research to them and request their permission to share their phone number with me so I could provide them with more details.

108 One of the problems which quickly arose was that mobile numbers from 2007 were no longer still active in 2012 and many times landline phone numbers were not listed in the database. At times, no phone numbers were available at all. If there was a phone number available, the constabulary employee called and left a voice mail explaining the reason for the call and requesting a call back. After three months of low response rate, I opened up my criteria to involve any young woman between 18 and 25 who had taken part in either street RJ or conferences (rather than just conferences). When this also returned low numbers, I expanded the age criteria up to 30 years of age.

Once the civilian administrator had received permission for me to contact the participants, I called them to introduce myself and describe my research. The young women I spoke to had various degrees of understanding about what the research was about. One person believed she had to pay to take part of the interview. I explained that they had been contacted because they had taken part of restorative justice but that my research was also about young women’s experiences with the police, getting into trouble, and about their lives in general. The interview was presented as an opportunity for them to talk about their lives and what was important to them and would lead to the recommendations to the police of how to improve services and interventions for young women. I explained that while the police had contacted them for me, I did not work for the police and would change their names so that their stories would be anonymous. Two women declined to take part in the research after I had spoken to them.

By January 2013, I had only interviewed four participants. Although the administrator at the constabulary was calling at every opportunity she had, she only worked twice a week and this work was only one small part of the rest of her duties, which took precedence. She and I decided that since the response rate had been so low, the next step would be to send letters out to the participants (see Appendix 3). The letter I drafted tried to frame my research in a fresh way that might connect to young people, feel less academic, and clarify that I wanted to hear about young women’s lives outside of offending as well.

Not surprisingly, the same problem that existed with phone numbers also existed with addresses. Many young women no longer lived at the same address in their twenties as

109 they did in their teens. By June 2013, 168 women had been contacted for interviews via phone or letter, sometimes both. I had contact via phone calls, text messages, or e-mail with sixteen young women from that pool of 168. Three changed their minds about taking part. One young woman called me to refuse, and in the end, 12 were successfully interviewed—around 7% of those invited. In sum, using the police to recruit on my behalf was difficult for the reasons described above and because many young women who had offended were suspicious of the police calling them to recruit for interviews.

The young women did not believe there was a distinction between the police and myself, regardless of what I said. When I began speaking to the women, many said they did not trust or like the police and did not want to help them. Having the police reach out to them first was sometimes a shock, especially after some time of not offending, as described by this participant, “Like when I received the call to speak to you. As soon

as I heard _____constabulary I thought, what, I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong, what do you want from me?” The young women associated a call from the police as a

sign of trouble and, therefore, immediately felt suspicious or nervous. One participant described receiving her letter (which was forwarded to her from her father) as a ‘shock’ since this had all happened so long ago, “This happened years ago. I was shocked when

I got the letter.” Another young woman said her experience in RJ had been so terrible

she in no way wanted to relive it by talking to me.

Despite my conversations with the young women on the phone, some did not understand how much information about them I had received from the police beforehand. This distrust of the police and concern about how much access I had had to their records appeared throughout the interviews, as illustrated by the following participant:

Interviewee: Before with the police. Oh I was in so much trouble all the time. Like obviously I don’t know what they’re said or showed you my record or give you a bit of information.

Birgit: I don’t have any information other than what you tell me, so… Interviewee: Oh (laughter).

Birgit: That’s how I choose to keep it. That way you can share whatever you want with me and I hear it from you.

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Interviewee: (Laugher). Well with the police. I don’t like. We don’t get on.

I found that participants had to be reassured that I had not read a substantial file on their past behaviour before they felt comfortable speaking to me. In truth, I had not received much information on participants prior to the interviews. Although I selected participants due to their ages and knew the police version of their offences (in the form of one to five sentences), by the time the letters had been sent out and participants responded to me, I had no way of knowing who was who or for what offence they were referred.

The young women were protective towards their records and felt shame and fear at the thought that anyone could view them, as illustrated in this participant’s use of the word ‘die’ to describe her feelings. Once they had participated, however, many participants described feeling empowered about allowing to share their opinions.

Interviewee: Do you know what? It was really good to talk about things like. Because I don’t. I was saying to my mum I was quite glad that the woman and you actually contacted me because at first I couldn’t really understand what she meant when she. I thought, well, what was this about then? I thought she just gave my name and showed someone my record or something, and I thought, no, die…

Birgit: No…

Interviewee: But then when I spoke to you about it, I was, like, oh, yeah, because I obviously say what I think and things like that because I always like saying my thing. I like to share my opinion (laughs), but, yeah, it’s been good. I’ve really enjoyed it.

The greatest response I received was from the first batch of letters that were sent on my behalf by the police (nearly half the sample). Although the police sent these letters out, they had failed to include an accompanying letter saying so. Since the letters were sent in plain envelopes, there was no indication that the letter was being sent by the police. Although one person was distraught at receiving such an unsolicited letter and chose not to take part, the fairly high response rate by others who were recruited and interviewed through this letter indicated that other participants might have come forward had I not recruited through the police.

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The Narrative Interview

Although there is no one agreed upon way to conduct a narrative interview, some suggest they should be conducted with the interviewers asking the participant to tell their life story with few other contributions (such as part of the Biographic Narrative Interview Method as described by Wengraf (2001; 2006)). Others, such as McAdams’ (1993) approach combines unusual questions such as having participants think about their lives as a book, coming up with titles and narratives for each chapter in their life with further questions about ‘high’ and ‘low’ points in life, future plans, and so on (McAdams, 1993, Crossley, 2000). Finally, some suggest that the presence of the interviewer will always affect the participant’s life story (Bruner, 1990) and simply advise the analyst to consider the interviewer’s contribution as part of the narrative (Riessman, 1993), coming prepared with “5 to 7 broad question about the topic of inquiry, supplemented by probe questions in case the respondent has trouble getting started” (Reissman, 1993: 55). Of these approaches, two (McAdams, 1993 and Wengraf, 2001, 2006) offer the closest that exists in terms of a ‘manual’ or guideline in how to both interview and analyse narratives. Perhaps for this reason, McAdams’ approaches in interviewing have become popular in a variety of fields such as criminology (Maruna, 2001) and psychology (Crossley, 2000). Mischler (1995), for example, suggests that McAdams’ style of interview is especially appropriate for large samples of participants where life stories are intended to be compared and analysed together; “Imposing a telling on the told,” or “standardiz(ing) the format for eliciting accounts” may allow for a more straightforward analysis (Mischler, 1995: 99).

While I was drawn to different aspects of these interviews, I was aware that several aspects of the recruitment and the setting might make it difficult for young women to tell their stories. The first had to do with the unnatural setting of an interview. Other than interviews for employment and perhaps a police interview about their offence(s), it was likely they had never experienced this kind of interview. This might lead to feelings of shyness, which would affect the ease with which they told stories. I was also aware that recruitment had occurred through the police had raised some powerful emotions in potential participants—including fears that the police had shared private information, or that I would—which might produce guardedness in terms of what they could or should talk about. For these reasons, I decided against interviews which would

112 have me sit back and ask participants to do all the storytelling work. I also strayed away from questions I thought were a bit clunky. Asking participants to imagine their life was a book, for example, (McAdams, 1993) might certainly encourage participants to think about their lives as “literature” (Freeman, 2000, Freeman, 2004), ensuring that their narratives would deliberately contain a sense of dramatic tone, imagery, and metaphor (McAdams, 1993). However, more ‘naturally’ told stories in interviews have been seen to contain these elements as well (see Gergen and Gergen, 1983) but perhaps in a less self-conscious manner. I also was not sure how much young women, of the technology era, would identify with crafting their life stories as a novel.

As for the Biographical Narrative Interview Method (Wengraf, 2001, Wengraf, 2006), I had the sense that given the difficulty of recruiting, getting young people to agree to three separate interviews with the same person would likely not be possible. What I took from the BNIM approach, however, was a kind of modified version of the first and second interviews. I was committed to having space for the young to say what they wanted to and how they wanted to beginning with an introductory question that would simply encourage them to speak. I embedded the second stage—researcher’s follow-up questions—into the first section. Thus, the participants would be encouraged to speak about whatever they wanted to, and when there were lulls in the conversation, I would ask a follow-up question to what they had just spoken about. The only exceptions to this follow-up strategy was that that if the participants did not spontaneously bring up offending or restorative justice, I would. I also concluded the interview with some questions to leave them feeling empowered such as, “What advice would you give to the police when they work with young women?”

In preparation for the interviews, I constructed a fairly detailed interview schedule that asked open ended question about various stages and events, which the literature suggested were important in young women offenders’ lives and which borrowed from the interview styles discussed above. These included who took care of them as children; who they turned to when they were sad or happy; what school was like; if they had a best friend; what they did after school; and so on. This produced an interview schedule of many questions. Since I was not about to go into a narrative interview armed with so much of my own talk, I narrowed this list down to five question categories, which included childhood, school, adolescence, friends and dating, mental health, work,

113 getting into trouble, important relationships, current lives, and future plans (see Appendix 4). Both versions of the schedule have obvious influences from McAdams’ (1993) and various restorative justice theory (Wachtel et al, 2010, for example). I brought a handwritten sheet of these questions with me and kept them by my side during interviews. I was, however, prepared to not use them at all, or to talk about things I had not considered but that the interviewees felt were important.

Scheduling an interview time that worked for participants was often difficult. I always called or texted participants the evening before to make sure the date and time we agreed on still worked. Several participants needed to change the arranged time either the night before or on the day we were scheduled to meet. Work and/or child care were the most common reasons why participants had to reschedule.

In order to create the most comfortable interview space I could, I asked participants to choose where they wanted to be interviewed. The only caveat I had was that the place should be somewhere they would feel comfortable talking about themselves in an open way. As a result, I mostly interviewed the participants in their own homes or a relative’s home at a day and time that worked for them. I also interviewed two participants at coffee shops of their choosing, and I interviewed one participant at the university. They greeted me somewhat nervously, and we made small-talk for several minutes, reducing some of the awkwardness. Most of the participants I interviewed at home offered me tea or water to drink, and the interviews either took place in the living/dining room or kitchen. Often participants requested having the TV on in the background. One participant’s lights had gone out so we conducted our interview in the dark with the TV in the background. I always re-explained the research to them and went through the consent forms before I began recording. If the interview took place away from their homes, such as in a coffee shop, I made sure to pick a table that was some distance away from others and made sure they were comfortable with where we were sitting.

Every interview was shaped differently, and I let the participants create the structure of their interviews. Most ranged from one hour to one and a half hours. After the first interview, where the participant told me she had assumed the police had shared her whole filed with me, I made sure to open with the same statement, which sounded something like this: “I haven’t been told anything about you, so could you tell me about

114 your life?” I found that variations on this question sometimes emerged, depending on my own tiredness or anxiety. Sometimes it came out, “Could you tell me a little bit about your life?” which produced a shorter narrative, more of a summary of some details about participants’ lives, which nonetheless were interesting to compare in terms of what they emphasised. Sometimes this opening question produced further questions from the participants like, “What do you mean? Now?” to which I responded they could tell me anything they wanted to and begin anywhere they wanted.

I was also prepared that asking these young women to talk about their lives might bring up some raw emotions. I had thought about what to do if they became distressed—offer to take a break or to talk about something else—and I was prepared to refer them for help should they want it. While some of the young women became upset at various stages of the interview, all wanted to continue the interview, and at the end most said they had enjoyed our interview. The last question I always asked was, “How did this interview make you feel?” which gave them an opportunity to talk through their feelings and give me feedback. It also let me know if I should offer them referrals. I offered to refer one young woman to support services for her mental health needs but she declined. I then checked to see what support she had at home, and she assured me that she and her mother spoke about her depression and that her mother had been pushing her to go to her GP.

Since I was approaching the research with a social constructivist perspective, I was planning on “interrogat[ing] how talk among speakers is interactively (dialogically) produced and performed as narrative” (Reissman, 2008: 105). In order to keep track of my “subtle but steady pressure” (Bruner, 1990: 59), I kept an interview diary where I recorded my interactions with participants over text messages, phone, and e-mail. After I left an interview, I typed my thoughts about how it went, my impressions of the participant and the environment, and of how I had felt throughout. These notes helped me understand how I shaped individual interviews both consciously and unconsciously and how each environment, in turn, shaped me and my interview style.

Although I would share the gender of my participants, I, at the age of thirty-one, was several years—sometimes more than a decade—older than my participants. We did not