Indicadores de decisión

My primary data consisted of 118 pages of transcribed interview material produced as a result of the small group and one-to-one interviews. I had also taken field notes every time I was on site at parliament, reviewed Hansard transcripts, video taped televised sessions of Question Time and collected newspaper articles of general interest as well as articles specifically on the Civil Union Bill. I chose in the end to focus my analysis on the interview transcripts rather than these other potential data sources. My initial desire to collect material from a variety of different sources was premised on the belief that there was a ‘real’ parliamentary work world that my research needed to map and I thought that by accessing as many sources as possible I would be more able to find the ‘real’ story.

The interview data covered a broad range of topics. My flexibility to participants’ initiation of direction during the interview encounter meant that frequently topics were broached by one participant but not by another. This made initial consideration of the transcripts and the search for themes complex. After sitting with the material for some time, and still feeling uncertain how to proceed with analysis, I was introduced to a data management process called framework, “a matrix based method for ordering and synthesising data” (Ritchie & Lewis, 2003, p. 219). I followed the authors’ instructions and felt the first glimmer of hope that there might be a way of making sense of the vastly different sorts of things participants had spoken about in the interviews.

There were essentially three steps in the data management process. The first step was to begin to get familiar with the data set. This was achieved by repeated readings of the interview transcripts, a single reading of diary and field notes, the creation of a three page list of topics and phrases that I identified in the interview material. This list was tied closely to the original language of participants, employing as little ‘abstraction’ as possible (Ritchie & Lewis 2003). The second step was the creation of a thematic index that began to establish points of connection in the discussions and topics. This step required abstracting from the material with a continued focus on the content of the transcripts rather than employing theoretical categories from literature. The third step involved applying this thematic index to the transcript material, a process called indexing but which resembles what others call coding (Ritchie & Lewis, 2003, p. 204).

During the exercise of indexing, my criteria for classifying certain comments as one thing or another required frequent scrutiny, further definition, and increasing clarification in order to bring consistency to the process. This was an extremely iterative process in which my growing familiarity with and understanding of the data resulted in approximately five versions of the thematic index before I settled with one which seemed to cover most of the material in the transcripts. This process stayed close to the data material in order to keep the analytic process ‘grounded’ in the data (Ritchie & Lewis, 2003, p. 222). Once the final thematic index had been established, the transcripts were re-indexed accordingly and the matrix framework was entered into Word document tables.

Incorporated into my early attempts at analysis was a tension in how to understand emotion in the research setting in a way that focused on participant’s own perspectives while I questioned the cultural assumptions surrounding emotion. In particular, I understood the division between reason and emotion as semantically constructed, but continued to think there was something behind the ‘illusion’ and that emotion would be identifiable through observation and language. In the early stages of the project, I considered rationality a social construct used to negotiate a socially powerful position for an actor, but I had not yet realised that the ‘emotion’ I searched for was equally socially constructed.13

13 _{Sociological discussions of emotion emphasising the need to consider the physiological, or corporeal,}

aspects of emotion and its experience (Turner & Stets, 2005, p. 4; Williams, 2001) led to a personal misunderstanding around the socially negotiated nature of emotional experience.

While analysis of a sort had begun to take place during the above mentioned process, it was only when I began to write up the data, incorporating my field notes as introductions to the chapters, that I came face to face with the gap left by an insufficiently nuanced understanding of the relationships between epistemology, ontology, theoretical perspective, methodologies and methods (Crotty, 1998). There was confusion in my understanding of the status of both language and emotion. The early methodological formulation of my study was informed by ethnography but this was also characterised by a belief in the sanctity of actor's experiences and a belief that they were able to represent this experience in language through an interview.

I had taken an inductive, qualitative approach to this research rather than a deductive or a quantitative approach because I understood emotion to be deeply entwined with meaning-making. However, I had problematically adopted an understanding of participants’ emotional worlds as something 'in them' – for me, something that was 'out there', to be discovered through my careful questioning and attentive listening. I visualised my participants’ meanings as gem stones that I could bring to light with the ‘pick axe’ of my questions. I had a ‘faith’ that not only did meaning ‘exist’ but that it was ‘knowable’.

Analysis

The methodological decisions a researcher makes influence the methods they are likely to use as well as how they view the analytic process. Some methods are amenable to a variety of different methodologies and analytic processes. For instance, ethnography as a methodology may employ the methods of participant observation, non-participant observation, or in-depth interviewing. Likewise, phenomenological research, action research or a methodology of discourse analysis may all employ the interview method but with different research goals for the data (Crotty, 1998, p. 12). In beginning my research using ethnographic methodology, which I understood as a methodology that prioritised the participant’s perspective, I had assumed I was taking a constructionist position; however, I had retained some positivist assumptions about the ‘knowability’ of emotion made possible through their accounts.

Realism in ontology and constructionism in epistemology turn out to be quite compatible … It would seem [therefore] preferable to retain the usage of ‘theoretical perspective’ and reserve the term ‘ontology’ for those occasions when we do need to talk about ‘being’ (Crotty, 1998, p. 11).

My confusion was based in taking realism, positivism and objectivism to be necessarily coexistent. I considered my approach to be constructionist because I did not support objectivism in the study of social life, and I was employing a methodology informed by ethnography and its interest in the perspectives of research participants. Guba and Lincoln argue that if

a ‘real’ reality is assumed, the posture of the knower must be one of objective attachment … in order to discover ‘how things really are’ and ‘how things really work’ (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 108).

Crotty argues that by linking realism and objectivism in this way, Lincoln and Guba imply one is concomitant with the other (Crotty, 1998, p. 10). This was certainly a misapprehension that I held and that manifested in difficulties when I faced the need to begin analysing the data. In the final part to this chapter, I account for my research experience and the effect of my changing understandings during the process of doing this research. For now, I introduce Table 4.1 to summarise the shift that occurred during the analytic stage of the research process. The key change was a methodological one from ethnography to discourse analysis. As the table shows, that change meant some of my ‘data’ was not used for analysis and other data took on greater significance

during analysis. The most important consequence was the change in the research outcome I was interested in developing.

Table 4.1 Charting the consequences of change in methodological orientation

Methodology Aims Methods Research

outcomes

Ethnography To discover parliamentarians emotional experiences and observe their ‘real’ experiences of emotion at work Field notes Interviews Collecting written media commentaries Taping media interviews with parliamentarians Themes An understanding of ‘real’ emotional experience A description of the emotional ‘culture’ of parliament

Discourse analysis To explore how parliamentarians ‘accomplish’ emotion in their accounts and the consequences this has for

understandings of self within those accounts

Interviews Data management using a matrix-based method Close reading of transcripts Interpretative repertoires

The reorientation to the status of my data described in Table 4.1 (above) first involved understanding the interview transcripts as participants’ ‘accounts’ of emotional experience and the topic of analysis, rather than taking emotion or emotional ‘experience’ to be the analytic focus. Considering the transcripts as accounts led to the adoption of discourse analysis as a methodology for understanding those accounts.

Accounts

Stories, discourse, talk, text, and narrative are all terms that may be used to refer to the product of an interview interaction. In this thesis, I use the term accounts (Harvey, Orbuch, & Weber, 1990; Orbuch, 1997) to refer to what was produced by transcription of my audio taped interviews with participants. I refrain from using the term discourse with reference to my own empirical data, although in this chapter I use the term

discourse to talk about other language-based research when that is the term writers themselves have used.

The term account has been used to refer specifically to attempts at apologies or explanations when events have not gone according to plan (Benoit, 1995; Scott & Lyman, 1968) but I do not use this term in this same way. Instead, I employ the term after Harvey, Orbuch and Weber (1990), to refer to language-based data that requires an interpretative search for the meaning and importance of life and events. Accounts are "meanings organised into a story… Accounts do not merely explain events, they also rationalise [and] justify …” (Harvey et al., 1990, vii). The literature on accounts led to an exploration of other work that took an approach to the transcripts from interviews as more than ‘content-based’. In the section that follows I explain how understanding language as active led to the use of discourse analysis as a methodology to inform my analysis of participants’ accounts.