An analysis of official documents published by the South African and the British state was undertaken to provide me with the necessary background knowledge when commencing on the fieldwork of this study, which is mainly represented by qualitative semi-structured interviews. In considering John Scott’s (1990) criteria for assessing the quality of documents, the documents I have selected can be said to be authentic – referring to whether the documents are of unquestionable origin
– as I have ensured that they have all been collected from trusted websites
providing official documents released by representatives from the South African and the British state. Turning to credibility – to what extent the contents of the documents can be said to be ‘biased’ or not – this is not a major issue because precisely by identifying the ‘biases’ inherent in the documents, it may be easier to reveal the actual intentions behind the South African and British state’s respective politics (Bryman 2004: 387). Representativeness, on the other hand, can pose a
challenge if it implies that the documents I will consider should be “representative
of the totality of relevant documents” (Scott 1990: 24). However, representativeness is not necessarily a requirement when conducting qualitative research, especially in my case where the documents are interesting to analyse in their own right as their official status makes them unique (Bryman 2004: 387). Finally, to discover the meaning and significance of documents, it is important to be immersed in the context in which the documents have been produced (Scott 1990: 31), which I have already gone some way towards doing in the previous chapter on South African migration to the UK.
I realised soon, however, that this form of documentary analysis did not give me the unique window into how South Africans in particular experience the impacts of British immigration and citizenship policies, for instance, but rather a more general overview of the potential impacts of the policies on any non-EEA migrant who is encompassed by such policies. Policies should besides, as Shore and Wright (2011: 1) correctly put it, not be exclusively confined to text or
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documents. As such, it has arguably been more revealing to consult South Africans themselves through interviews. The documentary analysis outlined here has therefore been employed mainly with the intention of giving me the necessary background knowledge when preparing for interviewing, and has provided me with some valuable resources which I have referred back to when the interviewed South Africans have brought up issues relating to these documents.
Thus, the main collection of data was provided by qualitative semi- structured interviews, which enabled me to discover how policies not only impact
on South Africans, but also how these policies are ‘received’ by South Africans in
their negotiations of citizenship. The interviews were conducted individually and face-to-face with participants in their preferred location – whether in their home or workplace, or in a coffee shop near their home or workplace – in order to establish closer rapport with them. An interview guide was initially written, with some subsequent amendments as the fieldwork progressed and it was realised that certain questions, for example, needed to be excluded while others were included (see Appendix 1 for the final interview guide). The main interview topics set out in the interview guide were, however, followed throughout the fieldwork. These overarching topics pertained to participants’ previous life in South Africa (and in any other countries) before migrating to the UK, the dynamics of the migration process and the negotiation of immigration and citizenship policies, the
participants’ everyday lives in the UK, as well as their sense of belonging. Within
these general topics, some of the questions asked to participants had been pre- conceived in the interview guide. Yet, questions often varied as I asked follow-up questions pertaining to what the particular participant wanted to talk about within the pre-defined interview topics. The strength of this form of semi-structured interviewing is, thus, that it enables people to answer the questions more on their own terms than with regard to more structured forms of interviewing, while at the same time permitting a more comprehensive structure to compare differences and
similarities in the participants’ responses than would do interviews of a more
unstructured nature (May 2001: 123-4).
In enabling some comparison, I would necessarily attempt to direct
participants ‘back on track’ by posing questions more in tune with the interview
topics insofar as participants talked about issues not of immediate interest to these general topics. Yet, as far as possible, I allowed participants to raise and expand
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on issues of interest to them by posing the introductory questions of the respective interview topics in a relatively open-ended and non-directive manner. For example, after having introduced the main aim and purpose of the study for the participants, I started off each interview by asking the participants to tell me about their childhood in South Africa. Thus, I did not ask specifically what aspects of their childhood I was interested in straight away, but rather enabled participants to take the initiative to tell me about the aspects of their childhood that seemed most important to them. Sometimes, of course, participants were unsure as to where to begin and asked me, for example, what aspects of their childhood I was specifically interested in. As a backup strategy, I would then ask them where they grew up and where they were raised as a point of departure for further and more specific accounts with regard to their childhood. In most cases, nonetheless, participants were keen to start talking about certain aspects of their childhood without asking me for further clarification. Throughout the interviews, I was attentive to what participants told me and tried, to the best of my ability, to pick up on this by later asking follow-up questions relating specifically to their own respective stories and senses of reality (May 2001: 123-4).
It could therefore be said that the choice of a semi-structured variant of interviewing encouraged participants to talk about issues that they were preoccupied with, some of which I, as the interviewer, probably would have been unaware of if a more structured and enclosed approach to interviewing had been adopted. Arguably, allowing participants to expand on issues of their own concern gave me richer and more detailed data material as to how the various descriptions of their circumstances and the interpretations and meanings attached to these have been reflected in the interview accounts. Even a certain degree of ‘rambling’, or talking about whatever presented itself off the top of the participants’ heads, was therefore encouraged with this in mind (May 2001: 123-4). This flexible approach, which has put the interviewees’ accounts at centre stage within some set research parameters, was facilitated by my use of a digital audio-recording device to capture the interviews. The audio-recordings of the interviews were subsequently stored on a password-restricted computer and fully transcribed verbatim. The interviews usually lasted around one to two hours each, reflecting the willingness to which most of my participants opened up and were interested in expanding on the issues at stake.
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Moreover, I was also allowed, with my participants’ consent, to intermingle with them and engage in some informal conversations before and after the interviews in order to generate richer data material. This might be classified as a form for occasional participant observation. Judith Okely (1994: 23) claims that participant observation can in some instances be more conducive than interviews, since the former usually enables the researcher to be more
immersed in individuals’ everyday practices and contexts than the latter. It must
be said, though, that I was not immersed in the field to the extent that researchers such as Judith Okely have been. I used ‘participant observation’ only to supplement my interviews and it only occurred on an occasional basis before and after the interviews. This is similar, although perhaps not as extensive in its reach,
to Mark Israel’s (1999: 13) approach of visiting some meeting points for South
Africans and mix socially with them now and then. By interacting with South Africans in their everyday lives before and after the interviews, I did come across
‘naturally-occurring’ talk and conversations that in some cases threw further light
on issues that were touched upon in the interviews. I therefore believe that these informal conversations, which involved talk about everyday matters that concerned the participants in order to ease their interactions with me, have fostered a different perspective to my data. It could also be speculated whether they have added data more in accordance with participants’ meanings, especially
when contrasted to the possibly ‘obtrusive’ setting of the audio-recorded
interviews in spite of my best intentions to keep the recorder out of my
participants’ sight. The informal conversations were remembered to the best of
my ability, and the most important aspects which emerged from them were written down as field notes immediately after I had left the participants (Fangen 2004: 141-9).