Based on census records, the Indian American population has increased significantly across the last decades. In 1980, the Indian American population was 361,531; a decade later, the population had more than doubled to 786,634. By 2000 U.S. census, the Indian American
population had increase more than twofold to 1,645,510. I was not concerned about locating enough participants. Participants for my study were spread geographically across New York, New Jersey, Georgia, and California. The majority of the couples were from central and northern Indian states such as Gujarat and Bihar. Three couples were from south Indian states. All of the participants identified as Hindu except one father who identified as Jain and two fathers who identified as Muslim. Participants ranged in aged from the youngest, 28 years old, to the oldest, 50 years old. The average age of the mothers was 37 with a range of 30 to 46 years. The average age of the fathers was 39 with a range of 28 to 50 years. Children ranged in age from two months old to 23 years old. At the time of the interview, three couples had only one child, and the
remaining couples had two children. The median age of the children was eight years old. Eight couples reported that they view their marriage as arranged. The degree of parental involvement varied from parents overseeing all interactions between prospective bride and groom to merely setting up the introduction and allowing the couple to decide on their own. Ten couples reported they met without any sort of arranged introduction.
Although I did not specifically ask for household income, I believed all participants to be at or near upper middle-class. I base this assumption on prestige of residential neighborhoods, educational attainment, and occupational prestige. Because I had some degree of familiarity with most of my participants, probing into their incomes would have been awkward. Moreover, my participants were very generous to create time in their busy schedules for me, so I wanted to be as respectful of their privacy as possible during the interview process. All participants were either entrepreneurs or other professionals. Additionally, all participants had at least a bachelor’s degree; half had earned a master’s or higher degree. My assumption concerning participants’ social class status is in line with the national average. Indian Americans rank in the highest
percentile for educational attainment. Their household income tends to be higher than the national average.
Of the 18 mothers, six had earned degrees beyond a bachelor’s degree. Twelve fathers held degrees beyond a bachelor’s degree. Thirteen of the mothers were employed full-time in the paid workforce. Two mothers worked part-time in the paid workforce. Five of the mothers identified as stay-at-home mothers and did not work outside the home. All 18 fathers worked full-time in the paid workforce.
ANALYSIS
The first analytical dilemma was how to examine literally hundreds of pages of interview transcripts. During this phase, “I am drowning in data,” was my standard response to well- meaning inquiries about my progress with this project. Eventually, though, I began to make sense of the data by first making simple notes and highlights to sections of the transcripts and my field notes. This first phase of coding involved grouping topics that first resonated with me. As these groupings or topics became more specific, I then went back to the literature to substantiate and give context to the data. Ultimately, the interview data were manageable and a rough outline of overarching “groups” emerged (e.g., religion, mothering, and prejudice and discrimination). Before I could get into the nuts and bolts, if you will, of coding, I spent some time evaluating my analytical process. That is, what am I analyzing here, and why? Given my position as someone married to an Indian American and a woman who runs a household, how does my position influence the outcome of the interviews as well as my analysis? This question is particularly salient when I considered the perspective of the women in my project. In other words, I was more concerned about my status as a woman than my status as a white American.
In exploring family, was I attending to the father more than the mother? I became of aware of the subtleness of my actions in order to evaluate whether I tended to pose more
questions to the father than the mother. Basically, my concern was that I was unaware of gender hierarchy. Thus, the gendered pattern of men as head of the household might dictate who was asked more questions on the joint interview. Moreover, when discussing division of labor in the household, did I lead the participant insofar as assuming that the mother performed more chores than the father? Perhaps, instead, given our shared experiences, I was filling in the gaps for women in the interview. More importantly, was my position influencing my analysis? I borrowed from DeVault (1999) to evaluate the “women’s standpoint,” and believe that my gender overall had a positive influence on facilitating the entire analytical process. DeVault (1999) outlines four aspects of work with interview data: constructing topics, listening, editing, and writing.
DeVault (1999) explains that the researcher needs to go beyond social scientific
vocabulary to translate women’s everyday experiences. This was certainly true for me as well. I run a household, so I did frame my questions and my participant’s responses within familiar experiences for interpreting household routines. I would laugh or joke in response to the shared experience of “women’s work.” “I have the same experience.” “I know exactly what you mean,” are examples of responses I provided. I believe this empathy not only built rapport, but simply created a common language. As DeVault (1999) describes, there is more to analyze than just words. That is, I identified “kinds of practice and thought that are part of female consciousness, but left out of dominant interpretive frames, shaped around male concerns” (p. 65). Thus, during the coding process, I created categories from shared experiences more than from “disciplinary categories” (p. 65).
When women interview women, the role of researcher and subject can change. In other words, the researcher no longer needs to refrain from ever showing empathy with the participant. It is difficult for women to deny or ignore shared experiences. I can listen as a woman and fill in my experience from time to time. Consequently, women did discuss or delve into details of their lives that perhaps they had not thought about explicitly before, such as interactions with mother- in-laws or how often they specifically prepare Indian food and how they feel about that.
DeVault (1999) suggests we delve further into our interview data for not just the “good quotes” but the inarticulate thoughts and concerns. Also, I looked for simple responses or statements such as, “it would be good,” or “it would be nice,” in reference to culture and their children. These kinds of sentences might be overlooked in coding because of their mundane quality. However, I had to listen to the overall sentiments being conveyed because, frequently, my participants did not explicitly outline how they define culture and envision it for their children.
When editing, I had to look beyond a literal meaning of what was said. I may not be a true insider, but through my connection to the community, I have extensive knowledge of Indian American families. Moreover, I am emotionally invested in these kinds of experiences. Hence, I am representing the subject or as DeVault (1999) says, I have great authority as “translator and mouthpiece” for my respondents (p. 75). I am using the actual words spoken, but I am piecing them together for a particular narrative - a narrative that I hope represents the experiences of the participants in my study and maybe others in this ethnic group as well.
When I began writing up my findings, I did feel a responsibility to “get it right,”
whatever “right” might be. Constantly, I am working between the formal sociological discipline and my liminal insider status. DeVault (1999) points out that the explicit use of the respondent’s
words are necessary for outsider understanding. I focused on these four aspects of DeVault’s (1999) strategies and found that the writing “fell into place.”
The objective of my study was to focus on theoretical refinement concerning the construction of ethnic identity in the second-generation Indian American family. I chose to employ grounded theory as my analytical approach for analyzing the interview data, mostly because grounded theory facilitates a “rigorous” in-depth examination of people’s experiences. Through coding, the emerging concepts and categories can be “linked to substantive and formal theories” (Ryan and Bernard 2000: 782). There is more than one approach to grounded theory and numerous books and articles outlining procedures as well (LaRossa 2005: 838). I employed coding process outlined by Strauss and Corbin (1998) and further streamlined by LaRossa (2005). My approach to analyzing the interview data does not strictly follow the ground theory methods (GTM) of either Strauss and Corbin (1998) or LaRossa (2005). However, I did conduct open and axial coding. I did not develop selective coding, nor did I choose a core category. Nonetheless, to explain my analysis, I first start with a brief overview of GTM, as I understand it.
Overview of grounded theory method
Open coding involves reviewing the data, sometimes line by line, and asking questions to generate propositions or hypotheses about what is “going on.” The objective of this initial step is to generate concepts. Concepts are linked to indicators which are the actual words used by the respondents that indicate action, interaction, or events. Eventually the concepts are developed into categories by understanding the concepts in terms of their properties and dimensions. Categories are a higher level of abstraction representing social phenomena derived from the data.
The label of the category, like concepts, is related to the context of the situation depicted in the data, but more importantly, the label represents the context from the standpoint of the researcher. Thus, open coding involves inductive and deductive processes. Strauss (1987) recommends that open coding continue until the concepts cease to “yield anything new” (p. 25).
Although not necessarily sequential, axial coding can begin once some categories are developed through open coding. During open coding, the researcher is developing categories. How the categories are interrelated is explored during axial coding (LaRossa 2005: 849). That is, axial coding is a process whereby conditions, actions and interactions, and consequences are identified (Strauss and Corbin 1998: 126). This is the stage where structure and process are linked. “Axial coding is the phase at which grounded theory method research begins to fulfill its theoretical promise (LaRossa 2005: 849).
The last aspect of ground theory is selective coding. This stage, like previous stages, runs more concurrent than sequential. “Selective coding is the process of integrating and refining the theory” (Strauss and Corbin 1998:143). Another key component of selective coding is
determining the core or central category. The core category has great analytic power and explains the most variation in the other categories (Strauss and Corbin 1998: 146). Strauss (1987), citing Glaser (1978), outlines six criteria for determining the core category (p. 36). In short, the core category must be central, appear frequently in the data and relates easily to the other categories. By focusing on the core category, “the theory moves forward appreciably” (p. 36). The name or label of the core category should be abstract enough that it can be applied to other studies (Strauss and Corbin 1998: 145). Lastly, the core category explains the variation as well as the central point of the data. That is, as the conditions change, “the explanation still holds” (p. 145).
Grounded Theory Approach
In terms of formal methodology, I did not exactly employ Strauss and Corbin’s (1998) version, but rather relied more on LaRossa’s (2005) version as the foundation for my analytical approach. I began with open coding. In the beginning, I laboriously copied and pasted sentences and sometimes several lines of transcripts into MS-Word files. I grouped these indicators based on my initial perspective of how I believe the excerpts were associated. By the end of open coding, I had moved indicators from one file to another. The files names might be literal as in “marriage: how they met,” or names might be more general and vague as in, “perceived prejudice or discrimination.” The interview guide influenced my perception or anticipation of my concepts as the questions are structured for a particular probe. For example, because I have several questions addressing religion in the family, I knew that I would have categories related to religion. My theoretical framework guided my analysis in the initial coding and the categories that, ultimately, I used in shaping a picture of the family’s culture.
For example, as I coded for indicators that eventually shaped the categories pertaining to marriage, I was perplexed as to how I should articulate the properties. Immediately, I thought in terms of “western” to “traditionally arranged.” Clearly, I could not place the marital process on a continuum with these terms. Hegemonic American culture tends to view arranged marriages as outdated and lacking of individual choice. Hence, arranged marriages stand in conflict to American values. Using the term, “love marriage,” implies an inherent power dynamic where the Western approach involves “love,” as opposed to the loveless arranged marriage. Through the coding process, I noted the level of parental involvement throughout the period leading up to the wedding ceremony. In general, arranged marriage is characterized by the union of two families; parents are involved in setting up the initial introduction of the couple. On a continuum
of high parental involvement to parents not involved at all, I dimensionalized the property of how the couple met. Employing an Orientalist perspective, I also coded for difference in the couple’s views on marriage. Did they distance themselves from the tradition of arranged marriage or embrace it? What I found is that no couple appeared to be critical of arranged marriages. The marital process varied by parental involvement. For the couples with the least parental involvement, they did not explicitly state that they did not want their parents to be involved in anyway. In fact, for these couples, parents’ views on their relationship mattered to my participants. Pertinent to the marital process for my participants, was determining when to tell their parents about their relationship. Hence, parental involvement impacts more than just setting up the introduction.
“How they met,” is a variable or property of “marriage” and “when to tell parents” also. As explained, this variable ranges in terms of parental involvement from high parental
involvement to very little parental involvement. The following excerpt demonstrates low parental involvement. This couple is placed to the right of the center or halfway between the middle and the far end point.
Mother: Well, yeah. In the overall big picture, we were pretty open. At first, we started to date in October that year. So it was right away freshman year and then I didn’t tell my parents. But they had a clue by November because I think you sent me flowers or something over Thanksgiving break or something like that.
Father: Special friend.
Mother: Yeah. That’s right. My mom called him my special friend after that. But by December break, winter break, I brought him home and I went to visit his family and then everybody knew and it was all just accepted after that. Everyone looked at it like boy, did we break ground by just doing that. But I wasn’t able to lie to my family. I’m very close to my parents.
This portion of the interview described how this couple began dating in college and eventually shared the status of their relationship with their families. In understanding how marriage occurred parental involvement was minimal. This couple met on their own with no parental involvement. However, explaining that they “broke ground” and that she could not lie to her parents, indicates that parents are usually involved and, most likely, the decision to tell them about their relationship involved serious deliberations.
Other times, a poststructural lens offered a way to explore the influence of hegemonic culture – be it Indian or American. For example, religion involved the interplay of both cultures. Most of my participants identified as Hindu. Interestingly, Hindu Indian Americans generally, do not convert to other religions (read: Christianity). Even though the second-generation Indian American may have lived 20 or more years in the United States, Hinduism remains an important connection to the Indian American community. Thus, I begin to explore religion in regards to Indian culture and identity. Hegemonic Indian culture may influence the likelihood that families maintain Hinduism for third-generation children. As mentioned, Hinduism maintains a
connection to the community, but it also teaches Indian culture to third-generation children (Min 2010). Through coding, maintaining Hinduism demonstrated the influence of hegemonic Indian culture, but I also found that Western hegemony influenced the ways that Hinduism was
understood within the family. I also searched for “how” Hinduism was practiced in the family. Pujas (Hindu rituals) were reported to be the primary way that participants practiced Hinduism. Through coding, I revealed that participants, unlike their parents, wanted to understand what they were actually doing to satisfy each puja. Focusing on this aspect of Hinduism, I revealed how Hinduism gets reworked to be practiced more like religions in the United States than Hinduism in India.
I continued coding until theoretical saturation and until I began to see overall patterns across all of the families. Of course, there were differences within family cultures and
experiences. For the most part, though, there was a certain “sameness” in how my participants described their family culture. I also searched for consistencies across categories. For example, if participants were concerned about their parents’ reaction to their pre-marital relationships, I would expect to see parental concern surface in other categories, such as discussing their parenting styles.
CHAPTER 3: