EL ESPÍRITU SANTO Y EL ESPÍRITU HUMANO

Ethnography involves a whole "array of methods and techniques" (Atkinson et al. 2001, p. 5) that includes, for example, "observation, participation, archival analysis and interviewing" (Reinharz, 1992, p. 46). In this research I used a combination of techniques to produce empirical data which involved taking field notes, writing memos of observations, conducting ethnographic interviews as well as semi-structured interviews, holding group conversations, and collecting secondary data including reports, policy papers, and leaflets.

The process of taking field notes, i.e. producing "written accounts of an evolving array of experiences and observed event" (Emerson et al. 2001, p. 365), varied depending on the circumstances in the field. During fieldwork at Groundworks, for example, I regularly sat in on one-to-one advice sessions between a support worker and client and took notes on the interaction as well as observed conversation (often in Slovak or Czech) as it actually happened. On-site note-taking took place also in other settings such as when I arranged (first-time or follow-up) meetings with key informants in public places such as cafes and bars, but also when attending various other events like meetings of Slovak interpreters, staff meetings or during field discussions with NGO workers or volunteers where note-taking was considered appropriate and normal. In other instances, for example, when working at the drop-in, in the Groundworks waiting room or when walking with an informant to the Job Centre or on a stroll

in the countryside it was impractical to write notes then and there. Furthermore, as I also experienced a few times during my fieldwork, taking notes during certain field situations such as in casual conversations, among strangers or 'on the go' can interrupt their 'natural' flow, or may even offend the research participant by showing that the researcher's attention lies elsewhere (Emerson et al. 2001, p. 357). In such circumstances, writing field notes required a great deal of remembering what was said and how (including keywords/phrases used, themes discussed, mode and atmosphere, setting). Lofland and Lofland (1995) refer to this ongoing act of "preparing yourself to be able to put down on paper what you are now seeing" (p. 90) as mental notes. As soon as possible I would put these mental notes into writing or voice-record them and transcribe them later. Overall, field notes took various forms and styles in this ethnographic study: from mental notes to jotted notes to detailed observations and thoughts; long and short accounts; pertaining to an individual or events/episodes; in English and Slovak. Once back at the desk, these field notes were then typed up. This 'tidying up' always involved acts of writing down, editing, extending, and thus transforming the notes from the field (Clifford 1990). Here I provide an example of a resulting, digitised field note:

What: Conversation with SM (2nd _{follow up) [language: en]}

Where: City Centre pub When: 30 March (11am)

General: SM looked tired today, he had come straight from work and was in a more

subdued mood than during our last meeting. He was talking at length about the changes he's going through as a young father. He works five days a week and on the other two days he has to look after his son, as his partner has finished her maternity leave and gone back to work part-time. He says he doesn’t mind this 'sacrifice' for his son but he also doesn’t want to change his lifestyle. He still wants to continue to see friends whenever he has time... He is very frustrated about this and says that he is 'working hard', providing for the family but also wants to keep his previous lifestyle. [...]

Commentary: As both SM and his partner can’t afford to pay for childcare at the

moment (and their parents aren’t around), they have to stretch themselves and their resources. This means that they have to arrange their working hours to accommodate childcare, leaving no day/time to spend on their own. This situation puts pressure on the family, and questions of (traditional) roles of father (as breadwinner/good father) and mother (caring) re-emerge.

Follow up: Both SM and his partner will be going to Slovakia for holidays in a few

weeks time; good to meet up when they’re back in Glasgow, especially since this will be the first time that they travel to Slovakia with their newborn son.[...]

As this extract indicates, the resulting field notes usually comprised four sections: alongside brief information on where, when, with whom, in what language and what had taken place, in the section 'general' I gave a narrative account of the specific situation or interaction; 'commentary', which documented any provisional interpretations, reflections or conceptual/theoretical ideas; and finally, 'follow-up', which were notes about what to do next, for example, what to keep in mind and inquire about in a next meeting/encounter. This format for structuring my notes was chosen as a way of addressing positivist notions with regard to field notes. As Clifford (1990) has critiqued, traditionally, field notes aimed at and were treated as objectively capturing social reality, as representing in great detail 'what is'. Instead of being subjected to analysis, elaborated and extended accounts of the field were often presented as the analysis of the insightful and expert ethnographer. 'Fieldnotes' came to acquire an aura of objectivity and science due to their secrecy and sacred status which bracketed the process of how they were created, in fact, co-created with the informants: jotting down a word, scribbling a picture, memorising a sequence of actions or an interaction, extending, enriching and editing the notes, negotiating meanings with the informants, probing ideas etc. 'Fieldnotes' as one word reflected and reinforced the notion that notes and field were inextricably joined up. Against this backdrop, I tried to make the production of my field notes as data explicit. Also, instead of keeping descriptive notes, theoretical notes and emotional notes on separate sheets of paper or electronic documents (as, for example, suggested by Gobo 2008, pp. 210-212) I have intentionally kept these aspects together in order to more accurately represent (and thus document) how what I observe cannot be fully disentangled from how I experienced the situation or what conceptual ideas I associated them with. As one can see from the above extract, descriptions in the 'general' section, and thoughts and interpretations in the sections 'commentary' and 'follow-up' overlap to some extent. More importantly, here, in line with the constructionist epistemology I outlined above, the resulting field notes are treated as a constructed version of social reality. Therefore, I treated field notes in the same way as other primary data that were produced during my research (e.g., transcripts of audio-recorded qualitative interviews) and subjected them to analysis and interpretation.

Qualitative, open-ended interviewing was another technique of data creation that I employed in this research. These conversation-like interviews with one, sometimes with several individuals, for example, a couple or family, aimed at getting more in-depth and biographical accounts from the key informants. This could involve exploring a particular theme that I had come across in previous meetings or learning more about informants' backgrounds and histories as well providing an opportunity for them to bring to my attention any issues that they felt to be important. Differently from my ethnographic interviews, some of these were audio-recorded. Some interviews were conducted in Slovak or Czech, others in English, depending on what the informant felt more comfortable with. However, while I was confident in communicating and conducting fieldwork in Slovak and English, I had not acquired the naturalness or ease with which Czech and Slovak speakers seem able to understand or switch to each other's language.39 On five occasions when interviewees indicated they preferred to speak in Czech I brought an interpreter along to the interview to assist me. In these cases, I guided the interview conversation with open and probing questions speaking in Slovak with the interviewee/s (who would answer in Czech) and involved the interpreter whenever I did not understand a particular reply or wanted to confirm I had understood a specific point correctly. The interview process, thus, did not resemble a fully "interpreter-mediated encounter" (Wadensjö 2013, p. 3) in the conventional sense, that is, the interpreter acting as an intermediary translating everything from English to Slovak/Czech and vice versa, 'channeling' the information between me and the interview partner/s. This way, the flow of the conversation remained largely uninterrupted by the interpreter, allowing the interviewees to talk freely in their native language. In addition, the interviews unfolded as casual and friendly conversations, as the interpreter and these research participants already knew each other; the latter were recruited from my fieldwork at Groundworks, while the interpreter was one of the support workers there. As I generally found during my fieldwork at Groundworks, the support workers were treated as confidantes by the clients well beyond the 'office hours', and clients would open up about all kinds of intimate and personal issues as well as asking for support

39 _{As Nábělková (2007) points out, although Czech and Slovak are phonetically and grammatically closely}

related languages, "numerous differences exist on all levels and become evident particularly when learning to use the other language actively, or when a foreigner speaking one of the languages comes into contact with the other" (p. 56).

with specific welfare issues. During the interview process the informants thus seemed comfortable to talk about their biographies and concerns.

This is not to say, however, that the interpreter was passive in the interview process. Firstly, as the interpreter and interviewee/s knew each other, the interviews inevitably invited situations when the interpreter would sometimes ask the interviewee a question or add a comment on a particular topic without being prompted by one of us. Secondly, the presence of the support worker led some interviewees to talk extensively about a particular problem or concern, perhaps in the hope of eliciting some extra advice from the worker or making sure that their concerns were heard. On one occasion, for example, a research informant asked me during the interview whether I had recorded his complaint about the lack of interpreting services at a local Job Centre. Although we held these interview conversations away from the Groundworks offices in informal settings such as cafes or pubs, there were moments during the interviews which reminded us of the advice sessions at Groundworks. Nevertheless, whatever the extent of an interpreter's involvement, their presence should not be seen as interfering with and disrupting the interview process and the data collection. The idea of the interview as a 'straightforward' question-answer activity in which, ideally, the data flows unhindered in one direction has been widely challenged in qualitative research. Here, the interview process was understood as dialogic, a social interaction in which data was co- constructed by those present, including the interpreter (Charmaz 2008, p. 402). Hence, the interview transcripts and their analysis included the contributions of all involved parties.40 Also, while I transcribed the English language interviews myself, the transcription of those interviews conducted mainly in Czech and Slovak was carried out by a native Slovak speaker. In the latter instance, I subsequently translated the interviews into English myself in order to check the transcripts together with the notes that I had taken during the interviews and to remain close to the data. In a session with the person who had transcribed the interviews, the

40

Transcriptions were produced based on a simplified and modified version of the transcription symbols suggested in Silverman (1993, p. 118). They included the initials of the involved participants; words or passages in another language than the main interview language (for example, an English expression in an otherwise Czech or Slovak conversation) were placed in quotation marks; situational or contextual descriptions were given in parentheses (e.g., laughter, a sound in the background); double question marks indicated words or expressions whose meaning remained unclear, or words that were inaudible; a dotted line signified an interruption of speech or a pause.

translated versions were then read together with the original to clarify any unclear phrases, references and correct any inconsistencies or mistakes between us.

Next to these two types of data that made up the main body of empirically derived 'texts' for the analysis I drew on various other data in a not necessarily pre-planned manner. For example, in the course of the fieldwork I collated texts in the form of email and other digital interactions including Facebook posts and messages when they seemed pertinent to the research; collected materials provided by various third-sector organisations such as project reports, leaflets, or material provided at events such as conferences and meetings; drew on statistical data, news coverage and film published online or in offline media here and in the Czech Republic/Slovakia. These various types of data were treated as secondary. Combining varying techniques to produce different types of data in this ethnography could be seen as an example of what Flick has termed "implicit triangulation" (2004b, p. 180), in that it did not aim to compensate for the respective weaknesses of each method in a bid to maximize validity of research results, but rather serves to enhance and multiply possibilities for approaching and thus understanding the subject matter at hand as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon (Atkinson and Coffey 2002, pp. 806-807; Flick 2004b, pp. 180-183).41

This aim of exploring diverse voices and perspectives of various actors in the field in order to arrive at a complex picture of negotiations of insecurities and risks also informed my analytical strategy. The great majority of the data was digitised and imported into the NVivo software programme which served as a data storage tool and, more importantly, as a means to digitally organise and work with the data. It is important to note that the body of data grew gradually throughout the twelve months of fieldwork and that the process of analysis did not begin once all data was 'collected'. Rather, as was visible in the commentary section in my field note extract provided above, conceptual and theoretical ideas were part and parcel of the fieldwork, guiding subsequent explorations of specific themes or the collation of more data on a particular issue or from a specific individual. That means, throughout the fieldwork process issues or meanings emerged that could be traced and probed across various already existent

41 _{Authors such as Denzin as well as Atkinson have revised their initial suggestion that triangulation was useful to}

increase the validity of empirical results by offsetting the weaknesses of the single methods, because this notion of a single reality 'out there' that can be accessed through different methods runs counter to the interpretative paradigm (Atkinson and Coffey 2002, pp. 806-807).

data units as well as examined and scrutinised again in the field. In this way, while I put the perspectives of the Slovak- and Czech-speaking migrants that were central in my field notes as well as interview transcripts at the core of my analysis, I engaged with theory, concepts, and historical accounts in order to contextualise and interpret their experiences and positions with regard to dealing with risks and insecurities in Glasgow and beyond. The specificity of the local, small-scale interactions directly witnessed and co-produced by the researcher was thus enriched, combined, juxtaposed and interrogated with further such interactions over time, across individual cases, and with existing studies, other discursive representations, and theoretical concepts that brought into view processes and forces well beyond the particular case. Multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995), the extended case method (Burawoy 1998) and the notion of global ethnographies (Burawoy et al. 2000) present other, more established responses to the question of how contemporary ethnography can yield insights on phenomena that seem to stretch over and/or be shaped by processes on various scales such as the local, regional, national, global and their complex interconnections. As each of the following empirical chapters shows, I have forged my own way of working with and responding to the data, emphasising the epistemological heterogeneity of perspectives and lived experiences through an analysis that unfolded in a spiralling movement between data, theoretical engagement and back to the data.