Políticas transversales hacia las familias

According to Altheide and Johnson (1998), reflexivity means that the researcher is influenced by and influences the cultures, settings, and contexts he/she studies and represents. Hence, it is impossible for a researcher to eliminate his/her own voice from the representation of reality, and those who assume that social realities can be accurately captured without the effects of researchers’ agency fall into the trap of so-called “naive realism” (Hammersley, 1990, p. 5). As an ethnographer, I have adopted Hammersley and Atkinson’s (2007) view that the social character the researcher needs to be fully

acknowledged, as they state that “[a]ll social research is founded on the human capacity for participant observation. We act in the social world and yet are able to reflect upon ourselves and our actions as objects in that world” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007, p. 18). To me, the researcher’s character – behaving as an inseparable part of the social world under study while simultaneously acting as

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an observer of that world – is in fact the foundation upon which he/she

conducts research. It is because of this character that researchers are capable of describing social realities under study as objects in the world, rather than simply as their pure perceptions of realities or their ‘dreams’ of them (Hammersley, 1992, cited in Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). As such, I see myself as more committed to theepistemological position of so-called “critical realism”, based on Bhasker’s work (1989, cited in Brewer, 2000). Bhasker claims that social realities are the ever-changing products of reproduction and transformation processes brought about by humans’ daily activities and actions. Social realities are therefore neither entities outside of human agency nor pure products of human construction.

As a result, when undertaking research, it is necessary to bear in mind that a researcher’s identity and how he/she understands the social world have essential implications for the whole research project (Guba and Lincoln, 1994); the researcher needs to provide accounts that reflect his/her integrity as a researcher, as well as the research processes, in order to achieve the goal of being reflexive in their study (Brewer, 2000). From my perspective, this means that when reporting data collection and analysis processes as well as the research findings, it is crucial to fully acknowledge the effects of the role the ethnographer and his/her participation in the field play (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). In this way, sound, justifiable accounts of the social

phenomena under study can be produced, which overcome the drawbacks of naive realism – such as attempts to deny or eliminate the effects of researchers’ agency – ‘without undermining the commitment of research to realism’

(Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007, p. 17). The following paragraphs therefore provide reflexive accounts of the effects of the researcher’s personality, position in the field, and experiences of the phenomena under study on data collection and interpretation processes.

In this research, I adopted the position of a nastic and introverted person who valued listening to others and understanding their thinking and feelings in

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interpersonal contact. Inhabiting such a role is not difficult for me, as it reflects a part of my character in my daily social life. This role enabled me to enact the communicative skills to which competent ethnographers need to subscribe, such as showing interest, ignorance, and empathy towards participants, withholding pre-judgement when listening to them, and encouraging others to elaborate their ideas in conversations (Dick, 2006; Partington, 2001; Johnson and Weller, 2001). Accordingly, I tended to use open-ended questions in order to initiate conversations and to raise follow-up questions in order to move the communication to a deeper level, both of which are perceived as crucial skills that ensure high quality ethnographic interviews (Spradley, 1979; Partington, 2001). Such a questioning technique aims to create an interviewing

environment that is less threatening and more emotionally supportive in order to encourage participants to share their experiences as openly as possible. This was especially challenging in my research context, as issues related to emotions can be very sensitive and personal. Hence, the quality of data may be highly compromised if the interviewing environment was perceived as unsupportive.

As a young Chinese doctoral student who studied in the same university and lived in the same hall of residence as the participants, and who had previously studied in the same university at a taught Masters level, I shared many

commonalities with the participants: our mother tongue (i.e., Mandarin Chinese); a shared cultural and historical background; similar studying abroad and hall of residence experiences; and so on. As a result, I felt that participants saw me more as a student whom they knew well than as a researcher, which is reflected in how they referred to me: ‘学姐’ (‘the senior’). These common points facilitated the development of the researcher’s insider status, thereby decreasing the perceived power distances and enhanced mutual understanding, trust, and rapport between participants and the researcher (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). Hence, my insider identity helped participants feel more able to verbalize their complex emotional experiences and to enhance in-depth

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discussions in interviews, as well as to promote my emic understanding of the data.

This insider status, however, comes with its own limitations. For one thing, in interviews some participants seemed quite relaxed and talked in a very casual way so that it became more like a daily conversation or a long talk without any clear points or focuses. In such situations, I lacked the confidence to guide these participants towards saying something more ‘to the point’ without making them feel that I did not care about or disliked their ideas. Furthermore, I was

concerned about missing potentially useful information if I interrupted them too frequently. The outcome of this was a few interviewing records of an excessive length (i.e., between 2.5 to 3 hours) in my first round of interviews when I was in the early stages of my researcher role and therefore uncertain about what was relevant and important from the participants’ perspectives. In the later stages, as my researcher skills and understanding of the focuses of my investigations gradually improved, the problem of over-long interviews was overcome (see Appendix 5 for the length of interviews).

Another restriction was that I could become too close to the participant group due to this insider status and may therefore run the risk of losing an outsider’s view of their experiences. Erickson (1973) suggests that the task of the ethnographer is to see the familiar through a new pair of lenses; in other words, to make the familiar strange in order to interpret the familiar from a fresh perspective. In order to achieve this goal, I actively socialized with non-Chinese students in the university to gain chances to discuss their

intercultural communication experiences with Chinese students. This facilitated my own reflection on the data in terms of regaining certain levels of curiosity about relatively familiar thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, in order to discover the potential blind spots in my mind and to develop a relatively fresh

perspective on the same social phenomena. For instance, I used to agree with many of the participants’ belief that the lack of interaction between Chinese and host students was mainly attributed to host students’ unwillingness to

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communicate with international students. Having interacted with many non-Chinese students in the hall of residence under study, however, I

discovered that some host students also wondered whether Chinese students were bothered about participating in the host environment. As such, my interactions with host students caused me to reflect on my previous opinions, which in turn made me realize that the separation between Chinese and host groups was the result of mutual suspicion regarding the other group’s

unwillingness to be engaged in intercultural communication, thereby

transforming my previous opinion on this issue. Such a transformation may act as the basis for developing a more critical view on the data.