Educación Secundaria, tercer grado

After the interviewee has come to the end of their initial narration in a BNIM interview, the interviewer takes some time to formulate a series of narrative-seeking questions from the notes taken during the first part of the interview (Wengraf, 2001:119). The purpose of these questions is to generate more narrative, which, as previously explained, is the kind of language through which the meaning of an experience is most likely to emerge (Breckner & Rupp, 2002:295; Rosenthal, 2004:53). I agree with Wengraf that the break between sessions is helpful; I found it particularly useful during the first interviews, when I was unfamiliar with the technique of constructing narrative-seeking questions. On more than one occasion, however, this break between BNIM sessions proved unworkable because the interviewee continued to talk to me throughout this period. While I believe that this issue may have been successfully resolved had I been more assertive about the need for a period of quiet reflection at this point, I think that Fischer-Rosenthal and Rosenthal (cited in Wengraf, 2001:119) are correct in their assertion that such breaks may constitute an interruption in the development and maintenance of a spirit of co-operation and trust in the interview.

In constructing the narrative-seeking questions for the second part of the interview, the researcher takes into account two important factors, each based on the premise of maintaining intact the gestalt of the interviewee’s story. Firstly, the questions must reflect the original order of the topics as they were introduced by the participant. For example, if the interviewee talked about a pivotal incident in their childhood, followed by another that took place in their teenage years, the researcher would need to ask questions about the first event before they moved on to the second. It should be noted at this point, however, that the researcher does not need to ask questions about every subject the interviewee introduces in their original narration. Using the previous example, the interviewer may be interested only in the incident that occurred during the interviewee’s teenage years, and would therefore begin with a question related to this event.

Secondly, the researcher puts her questions together utilising, as far as possible, the words and phrases of the interviewee. Again using the previous example, if the interviewee referred to a ‘mate’ in her or his telling of the initial story, the researcher would also need to use this term in formulating her question, rather than ‘friend’, or indeed any other term. In short, during the second part of the initial BNIM interview, the researcher asks narrative-inducing questions using the interviewee’s own words and phrases, maintaining the original order of the topics as the interviewee introduced them during their story. Like the first part of a BNIM interview, the second session is difficult because the researcher has to manage multiple tasks: continued note-taking; the formulation of follow-up questions using the correct sequence and language; and finally, attentive and empathetic listening.13

Overall, I found this second session by far the most challenging. This was due, I think, to the fact that many of my interviewees’ initial narrations focused on the retelling of painful, often violent experiences that had taken place in their homeland. Following the template of BNIM interviewing, I was required to begin the second session by asking for more narrative about these traumatic experiences. Theoretically, I could have chosen to ignore these first stories, but I did not, as I believed that they were critical14 to my understanding of the interviewee’s migration experience. Asking these first questions often made me feel quite uncomfortable, for several reasons. It was difficult because the wording felt contrived and ‘unnatural’. Moreover, it was demanding because I was worried that my interviewees would perceive my focus as somehow voyeuristic. Lastly, it was uncomfortable because my concentration on stories of violence and injustice in South Africa could easily have been interpreted by the interviewees as my attempt to see their migration in simplistic terms as an escape from ‘bad’ (or racist, or violent) South Africa to ‘good’ (or non-racist, or peaceful) New Zealand.

After this second BNIM session had come to an end, I asked each interviewee if they would like to add anything further to their migration stories, and once they had made these last contributions, the audio-recorder was turned off. While this signalled the end of the BNIM-based part of the interview, I found that most interviewees wished to begin

13 Similarly, Wengraf and Chamberlayne (2006:22) describe session two as a ‘constant multi-tasking operation’.

14 From my current perspective, this turned out to be true in each of the three cases that were subjected to BNIM analysis.

a conversation about migration. As a result I spent between ten minutes and an hour talking to them about their particular migration, my own various resettlements, and the nature of the migration experience in general. This more casual interaction offered me the opportunity to further develop my relationship with the interviewees, to clarify certain biographical details which remained unclear after their narrations, and to talk about the timing and nature of the next interview.