Presentación y utilización del medio seleccionado

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I transcribed the interviews as soon as possible after each interview and tried to note down all the verbal and non-verbal aspects of their verbatim e.g., silences, change of tone, emphasis, emotional indicators, contradictory speech etc. because these could have implications for data analysis. Data was included as part of the main study.

4.3. Phase III: Main Study (In-depth Interviews)

4.3.1. Participants

Phase III of the qualitative part was the main study which comprised of 25 young adults (12 females and 13 males) who had lived with IPV since their childhood. All interviewees except one have already taken part in survey. The majority of them (17 out of 25) belonged to a rural background area university and had an experience of living in an extended family system (20 out of 25) and all participants’ mothers were housewives (never employed).

In-depth interviews followed the same procedures as the pilot study. When I was planning the survey, I did not have any idea about its additional advantage i.e., how beneficial it would be for my rapport establishment for the qualitative part. The way that survey participants contacted me and showed their willingness to take part in the interviews by giving their email addresses or mobile numbers on the questionnaire was really surprising. It was because of the surveys that I was able to access and contact my potential research participants easily. 76 out of initial 600 participants showed their willingness on their questionnaires to participate in interview. After, having a look at the experiences described at interview, I decided to contact those who

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showed greater exposure to IPV on scales. However, practically it was not possible to conduct in-depth interviews of all participants, so it was told during verbal information about researcher that I might not be able to invite every participant for interview. I contacted a few individuals about possibility of a focus group, however, it was not possible due to unwillingness. In last 400 questionnaires, I did not invited any more participants.

The interview process was undertaken in the same form and stages as the pilot interviews (mentioned above) and I felt myself to be more skilful in establishing rapport more quickly and in conducting interviews in a conversational style after the pilot. Ethical issues of confidentiality, anonymity, right to quit/withdraw from research at any time were thoroughly discussed. Certain practical issues arose in doing interviews which have already been discussed at length in the previous section ‘handling of ethical issues’ of this chapter. The findings from the qualitative part are presented in chapter five.

4.3.2. Data Analysis of Interview Data

All the interviews conducted were digitally recorded and transcribed into English. The length of interviews varied from 35 min to slightly above than 2 hours. Thematic analysis was employed to reveal recurring themes from the data by following the guidelines given by Braun and Clarke (2006). All steps were done manually (without the help of any software) because I personally felt more comfortable in doing analysis that way so that I could constantly look into the latent themes/patterns along with the apparent themes.

I read the transcripts of five interviews initially several times for coding/emerging themes which was refined after coding more interviews. This was not at all a linear

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process but I had to constantly analyse and re-analyse my data during initial coding of the interviews. This process took much time because I was also trying to understand the latent meaning of their words in the whole context.

To improve the rigour and credibility of findings, a colleague from National Institute of Psychology, Pakistan was also asked to read two anonymous transcripts (after removing all identities) of interviews and identify the apparent and latent codes. I discussed both codes (identified by myself and my colleague) with another colleague on skype (without mentioning who coded these transcripts) to discuss the match between coding. There was a consensus found on the codes/patterns overall, so I moved to the next stage to label themes where this process was repeated. This was done to ensure inter-rater reliability and agreement.

Focusing upon how young adults shared the memories of exposure to IPV, their emotional reactions and struggle to cope with this and rebuild their lives and their sense of self with the help of protective factors in the environment, several key themes were identifiable from data.

An inductive approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006) was adopted for thematic analysis that allows themes to emerge from the data, rather than fitting the data into pre-defined coding. This approach was followed because of the exploratory nature of research and because I was not using a single theory to explain the phenomenon of IPV. Verbatim statements exemplifying each theme were selected to maximise understanding of participants experiences and explicit comparisons have been made with themes that emerged in the open-ended survey questions.

100 Concluding Remarks

This chapter has provided a detailed description of methodology and the selection of a mixed method research design. The chapter has also elaborated how research was planned and carried out keeping the Pakistani cultural context in mind and handling of ethical and practical issues within the field by adopting a reflexive approach. The next chapter presents the quantitative and qualitative findings from the survey part of the research which involved data gathered from 1,046 university students.

101 Chapter 4