Modelo estadístico Hi: μ D > μ A

In my view, Charmaz (2006) paves the way for the integration of a psychoanalytic approach to the GTM with her exhortation not to “dismiss your own ideas if they do not mirror the data [for] your ideas may rest on covert meanings and actions that have not entirely surfaced yet” (p.54). As I have noted in Chapter 4, there is a considerable dearth of psychoanalytic methodology in the research field. Attention to the researcher’s subjectivity in the form of reflexive activity is becoming increasingly common in qualitative research, and there are an increasing number of studies which utilize selected aspects of the GTM together with a psychoanalytic approach (Hollway & Jefferson, 2013; Stopford, 2006), but I have been unable to find a study in my survey of the literature that fully incorporates a psychoanalytic frame into a thorough usage of

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the GTM. The title of Anderson’s (2006) study, “Well-suited partners: psychoanalytic research and grounded theory” held promise, but closer investigation revealed what I see as an intrinsic mistrust of psychoanalytic data in its own right by incorporating the need for triangulation with independent data to ‘prove’ validity. More problematically, in my view, she uses the classic form of the GTM which explicitly eschews interpretation.

As a result of my views about the co-created nature of experience, which I have discussed in detail in Chapter 5, I wanted to find a way to code and interpret not only each participant’s subjective experience but also the way in which the intersubjective nature of our interaction was creating that experience. This did not mean that I viewed the participant only as a ‘defended subject’ (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000) who was reacting to me, but rather that all the material emerging between us was data about the topic under investigation. This data included the manifest content of our conversations as well as the unconscious material accessible through analysis of countertransference aspects. I thus included my own observations and hunches, explicit and implicit, and often in the form of my countertransference reactions, into the codes. Because they had emerged from the intersubjective field between each participant and me, I considered them to be ideas that could be tested against the data in the current as well as later interviews, just as I did with the codes emerging from each participant’s comments.

To illustrate with an example, in Sally’s interview, we had difficulty with ‘regret’:

S: Even though … it provided me with fantastic opportunities Opportunity

professionally, and then now to have, to be able to raise my Raising children family in this country … From when I … Context of safety

From my own family point of view, Leaving family behind it probably wasn’t the best choice. Yeah … Sacrifice

C: When you say from your own family, you mean your family of origin?

S: my family of origin, yes absolutely

C: are you …….. Are you expressing regret? ?Regret

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The interaction reproduced in this extract occurred early on in our interview, and I had a strong sense that Sally was grappling with feelings of regret – in my reflexive process while listening to the transcript, I wrote: “It was almost as though she had said it and I hadn’t quite heard, so I needed to ask her to repeat it – and then she denied it! – I felt taken aback”. While doing the initial coding, I debated whether this represented my being insensitive and pushing her too hard, or whether in fact I had been ‘too sensitive’, and had picked up something that she was not yet ready to bring into consciousness. Hence I coded it with a query, incorporating my

psychoanalytic lens with Charmaz’s (2006) advice to note down moments when “your codes define another view of a process, action or belief than your respondent(s) hold” (p.54). Later in the interview, we had the following interaction around the word ‘regret’:

C: So there’s grief Grief S: Yeah

C: there’s regret, some regret … ?Regret

S: (sounding uncertain) hm… Feeling confronted? C: some regret of ‘should I have left, should I have done it like that’? ?Regret

S: I don’t know if it’s regret … Regret’s a hard word … Regretting is hard C: Ok … Which word feels better?

S: (pause) I’m not sure … It would be a bit of a milder one, Wish to tone down regret I’d have to think what that would be Lost for words

C: Ok

In my reflexive notes, I wrote: “I’m feeling regret now! I’m worried that I’m pushing her too hard”. Again I decided to hold that feeling and wait to see whether it was relevant to the data or not. A little later in the interview, ‘regret’ appeared again, and both Sally and I were able to note how the feeling had pushed its way into her awareness. I reflected whether I had ‘pushed the word into her’, whether I had been too powerful, but noted from the context of our

discussion that Sally had no difficulty in disagreeing with me when she did not resonate with what I said, and so I felt comfortable to remove the question mark from ‘regret’ and allow it to be manifest, as in the following extract:

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S: It’s a helluva big responsibility to say that you can increase your Feeling responsible parents’ longevity or whatever, but I think, but I think yeah, my ‘The death of them’ presence would have certainly made an impact on their quality of life. Could have helped So … But, yeah, there’s not much I can do about that now Too late for tears (voice breaks with tears and rueful laugh)

C: So … is some of that feeling – would it, would … guilt be too strong? ?Guilt

S: I don’t use the word guilt, necessarily. It’s not … It doesn’t sit well Denial of guilt with me, it’s not the kind of word I would use to describe that feeling Un-usable word

C: Ok, what’s the word?

S: I thought… You know, what came to mind is regret, and then I thought Regret

well, that’s not the right word, I just said it’s the wrong word! … Regret is wrong It should be more … Yeah (pause) … Um, I feel bad? Feeling bad

Guilt’s too strong …there’s something about just feeling bad …and maybe Guilt is too strong being … Yeah, regretful is the word that comes to mind (rueful laugh) Feeling regretful

Using the line-by-line coding technique was enormously time-consuming, but it was so clearly bringing material embedded in the data to the surface that it felt inherently right, and so I performed this initial form of coding on each of the 13 interviews. At the same time, I had noted after coding the second interview that certain threads were coming through, threads which I suspected were pointing to at least some of the directions that the analysis might take. This influenced my selection of the following two participants in the sense that my initial telephone conversations with them had indicated that they might be likely to cover these areas, and I wanted to explore these themes further. At this point I was moving towards the second phase of coding, which Charmaz (2006) calls focused coding.