Distancia de desaceleración y aceleración

My research follows a social constructivist and interpretivist paradigm, predicat- ed on the assumption that ‘no aspects of knowledge are purely of the external world, devoid of human construction’ (Stake, 1995: 100). It involved carrying out a ‘principled enquiry’ (Robson, 2002:10) into a specific situation in a particular local context. In this way, I hoped to gain better understanding of the ways in which the research participants experience the world and how they make sense of their experiences, while recognising that this understanding can only be ac- cessed through my own perceptions.

My research utilized qualitative interviews which, from the constructivist per- spective, are seen as a ‘construction site of knowledge’ (Kvale, 1996: 42), within

which researcher and participant converse together and, during the course of their conversation, construct narrative understandings of the world. The aim of my research was not to uncover objective truths or develop grand theories but to gain insight into the ways in which people experience and perceive the world, accepting that these may be multiple, emergent and potentially self-

contradictory. Rather than ‘causal determination, prediction, and generalization of findings’, I was interested in ‘illumination, understanding, and extrapolation to similar situations’ (Golafshani, 2003: 600).

My desire to obtain accounts of the participants’ lived experiences meant that it was essential for me to find ways of entering into ‘dialogic encounters’ (Bakhtin 1968) with them, to enable them to present their own accounts of their educa- tional experiences in their own words. Rather than attempting to maintain dis- tance from them, it was important for me to enter into relationship with them over a period of time, to gain their trust and to create the space for them to give their own accounts of their experiences in a way that was not overly constrained by a pre-determined structure or set of questions.

By focusing on ‘storied accounts of educational lives’ (Clandinin and Connelly 2000: 4), I hoped that my research would centralise the voices of the research participants who, as young, non-white women with non-Western heritage and members of a minority religious group, are often silenced by mainstream dis- course. Entering into relationship and building trust with the participants was an important pre-condition for obtaining these ‘storied accounts’ (Clandinin and Connelly ibid) from them.

My approach to the interview process was also influenced by feminist researchers, who emphasize the distinctiveness of women’s identity and

intellectual development, the importance of creating space to listen to women’s voices, and attentiveness to questions about the origins and identity of authority, truth and knowledge (e.g. Gilligan 1982, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule 1997). This led me, when conducting interviews, to focus on listening to the participants’ voices and creating spaces for them to be heard on their own

Since I wanted to focus on the accounts of students from a marginalised, mi- grant and rapidly changing community, it was important to find an approach that could ‘reach forwards and backwards in time, documenting processes and ex- periences of social change’ (Chamberlayne, Bornat and Wengraf, 2000: 2). In this way, my research had similar aims to life history research, which aims to try to understand how people make sense of the world and how they account for the things that happen to them (Goodson and Sikes 2001: 39). Like life history researchers, I hoped to use qualitative interviews as a way of gaining insight into the complexity of the informants’ experiences, thus foregrounding ‘the messy confrontation with human subjectivity which we believe should comprise the heartland of the sociological enterprise’ (Sikes and Gale, 2006: 8).

In taking a narrative approach, I chose to accept the limitations this may place on my findings in terms of conventional notions of reliability and validity, be- cause I believe this approach is appropriate for the questions I want to answer. This kind of research does not aim to discover something ‘true’ but to explore ‘the social and linguistic construction of a perspectival reality where knowledge is validated through practice’ (Kvale, 1995: 19), utilising ‘the extraordinary pow- er’ of qualitative methods ‘to picture and to question the complexity of the social reality investigated’ (Kvale, 1995: 23).

The main aim of my research was to use qualitative interviews to gather ac- counts of the participants’ experiences in a way that would enable me to ‘to pic- ture and to question’ their social reality (Kvale 1995). This reflects my belief that there is value in studying ‘a particular experience, in a particular setting, involv- ing particular people’ (Pinnegar and Daynes, 2006: 21). It was, nevertheless, important to ensure that my research would be seen by its potential readers as achieving a sufficient degree of ‘trustworthiness, rigor and quality’, without nec- essarily being constrained by conventional notions of ‘reliability’ and ‘validity’ (Golafshani, 2003: 604). One way of achieving this was to be as clear and transparent as possible in my explanation of the approach I took to the research process, including my interviews with the participants and the analysis of data

gathered during these interviews, as well as my consideration of relevant ethical issues.

I did not aim to undertake a ‘generalizable’ study, since I cannot claim that the participants in my research are a representative sample or that their experienc- es are likely to be similar to other young Muslim women living in the West. It is, nevertheless, my hope that my research will be useful and relevant to other re- searchers and practitioners who are interested in similar issues. Firstly, by ex- ploring the participants’ experiences and highlighting the similarities and differ- ences between them, it was my intention that the research would highlight some important issues about the ways in which young Muslim women living in the West are (mis)represented in mainstream discourse. Secondly, I hoped that my research would demonstrate the rich possibilities available to researchers who are willing and able to build relationships and enter into dialogue with partici- pants.