Lenguaje y narración

It was important to locate myself as interviewer within the research and to acknowledge my subjective position in this study as this is a key component in order to gain understanding of my relationship with my subject, as Bogdan and Biklen (2007) advise. Oakley (1981) wanted to acknowledge the role of the personal in constructing research knowledge and she felt that she shared a similar social location to her interviewees:

We both share the same gender socialisation and critical life experiences, social distance can be minimal. Where both interviewer and interviewee share

membership of the same minority group, the basis for equality may impress itself even more urgently on the interviewer’s consciousness. (Oakley 1981, p. 55)

But claims made by Oakley and other feminists (e.g. Finch 1984, Reinhartz 1992) about the status of knowledge via interviewing are considered problematic. Wise (1987) made an important contribution by arguing that Oakley (1981) and Finch (1984) actually avoid confronting the power dynamics that exist between researchers and their subjects. Wise does not accept that power imbalances are solved via women’s shared structural position.

In the research relationship, being women takes us so far, being a feminist a bit further, personal style and skill play an important part, but there comes a point at which structural inequalities do interfere with communication and understanding [...] we can, and do, exert power over each other. (Wise 1987, p. 74)

So, there are important objections to the suggestion that women share the same standpoint within a researcher/researched relationship. Whilst they may share experiences of structural oppression as women this may be influenced by different identities and oppressions, like age, ‘race’, sexuality, religion etc. In addition, they do not share the same positions of power within the research, and the power dynamics must be acknowledged rather than ignored. For example in my research I could have been thought of as ‘knowledgeable’ as I was pursuing a higher degree and so I was ‘better’ than my respondents. On the other hand, I could have been thought of as inferior to them because of my younger age.

Having experiences in common with participants gives access to information in relation to the very complex issues involved. So, as I am working in the same broad professional environment as the participants in my research (education), I am aware of some of the difficulties that women head teachers may be facing (i.e. issues with parents, LEAs etc). Also, as my mother was a teacher for 32 years but never a head teacher out of personal choice, I am aware of some of the possible reasons for the under-representation of women. The relationship between the researcher and what is being researched becomes symbiotic. On the other hand, Walker (1980) argues that past experiences of the researcher are a problem because they may mask issues and distort them in that s/he comes with the issues already within a conceptual pattern of importance. There were implications for my study in that I had a framework informed by both my own experience and by the research literature. I addressed this by ensuring that the participants had the opportunity to cover

issues that were important to them, within, or in addition to, my questions. So, I let them speak and did not interrupt them and at the end of each interview I asked them to add anything that they felt was not covered by my questions.

I argue that the interview is a dialogic relationship in which notions of power are shifting and changing according to how the subjects are positioned within particular discourses. Especially when I was interviewing some of the men, I felt that they wanted to show they were powerful. For example they wanted to appear as more knowledgeable by commenting on my questions, or they sat behind their desks in a formal but also relaxed manner, or they wanted to appear as very busy and that they were doing me a favour to participate in my research. Similarly Madrid (2013) notes that some men tend to draw on power discourses in order to stress their ‘masculinity’. Additionally, the interview is a re- counting of events, a narrative account (Mishler 1986), and it generates data rather than simply collecting data. This is an important distinction since data are not ‘”out there” as an already existing stock of knowledge, ready to be collected and independent of our interpretations as researchers’ (Mason 2002, p. 51).

The nature of my study demands reflexivity from the interviewer in order to get to the core of the experience in a relationship between peers where some of the participants were known to me. Platt (1981) argues that ‘this implies reciprocity and symmetry in the relationship’ (p. 80), in contrast to the general assumption that the interviewer and the interviewee are ‘anonymous to each other *...+ that the relationship has no past or future and the research roles are (or should be) segregated from all the other roles’ (p. 75). I attempted to deal with the issues above by ensuring that the participants were, as much as possible, in control of the interview, provided that we covered the outlined issues. There were no overt boundaries to the ideas and opinions they could express within the framework of the study. This way my past experiences or preferences would influence their responses and my analysis as little as possible. As a researcher with an understanding of the detailed context which might affect the findings, I employed reflexivity during and after the interviews. I did this by keeping a research diary where I was aware and conscious of my participants’ values, attitudes, perceptions, feelings etc, and how they were feeding into my research and of my own influences, feelings and constructions during the interviews.