Can I setting aside my fore-understandings as a gay man enough to understand participants' own lived experiences? Certainly, it is what I have tried to do during the entire process of these research studies. By adopting a reflexive approach during both data generation and the interpretative analysis, I continuously
reflected about my own interpretations of participants' life stories in order to move beyond my previous understandings and be close to my participants' own
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previous experiences as gay man and LGBT researcher might have impacted my interpretation of participants' lived experiences as lesbian women living in Chile and I note or bracket this where relevant in the thesis.
Notwithstanding, I am aware that I experience and interpret the world from a particular stance and that I cannot escape from this subjectivity. Thus, the purpose of this study was not to explore an 'inner essential true' or the 'objective reality' about participants' experiences. Instead, I have focused on the intersubjective realm by keeping in mind the interaction between the participants and me, the context in which we came into contact, and the way in which our understandings were bounded by time and place (Shaw, 2010). Consequently, the findings of these studies reflected the interpretation of the lived experiences of Chilean lesbian [and prospective] mothers through the lens of a Chilean gay man. As Shaw has suggested, I understand reflexivity as a hermeneutic reflection that considers both the researcher and the researched as experiencing human beings. The reflexive approach was a tool to navigate through the participants’ accounts and my personal responses to them. This work implied confronting and
interrogating my own fore-understandings, then attempting to move beyond them, and incorporating them into my interpretation of participants' accounts.
During data gathering, I tried to keep a reflexive stance to openly explore participants' life course stories and experiences. First, during the individual interviews and focus groups I tried to be open to what participants brought into their conversations with me. In my first study I used open-ended questions that followed participants' narrated stories. My previous training as a clinical
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me to explore participants' emerging stories being careful about not losing the richness from their experiences. Second, I tried to frame questions within the research topic that avoided simply addressing issues related to my personal research interests. For example, when some participants talked about their stories of psychological/physical abuse, as a clinical psychologist I wanted to explore more about their clinical history and the implications of such experiences for their mental health. I do not want to argue that it would not have been important to explore more about participants' experiences of victimisation, but it was not directly linked to the topic I was studying. Despite these boundaries and
reflections, I briefly addressed participants' experiences of psychological/physical abuse in Study 1.
Furthermore, after each interview and focus group, I wrote some reflexive notes to become more aware of where my fore-understandings and participants' stories overlapped (see Appendix 1 containing some reflexive notes). Even if I shared some experiences as a sexual minority person with my participants, through the course of my research studies I became more aware of the uniqueness of
participants' experiences as women and [prospective] mothers, and the intersection of these identities with identifying as lesbians. For instance,
participants had encountered experiences of gender victimisation and inequalities by living in Chile, a strongly patriarchal society. Additionally, building their own family projects by having children was a particular challenge that participants had to cope with as a sexual minority person and which as a non-parent I did not share. Thus, keeping a reflexive stance helped me to hear the singularity of participants' experiences.
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During data analysis, I kept the reflexive approach by keeping every interpretation close to what participants tried to say through their narrative and stories. I
considered this process as an iterative engagement with data which made me going back to the interview transcripts many times during the analysis to catch participants' own voices and be sure that my interpretation was not enhancing or hindering participants' lived experiences (Smith & Osborn, 2008). My experience analysing gay men's stories during my MSc research was extremely useful in this reflexive analytical procedure. For instance, I had a significant level of shared experiences with the gay men I interviewed during my previous qualitative study. Nevertheless, I tried to hear their own voices, and I believe I succeded in that goal. I found how religious discourses had negatively impacted gay men's self- acceptance process during their life courses, something that I was not aware had been part of my own sexual identity development in a way that made them explicit before starting the study. I am sure that keeping close to data during the analytical process of my Ph.D. studies helped me to be reflexive about lesbian women's experiences as mothers and prospective mothers. It seems that reflexivity became less an issue through the course of these research studies as the
distinctiveness of each participants’ experiences emerged.
After completing the data analysis and the writing up of the results, I conducted the audit of the findings of each study. The primary objective of the audit was to assess the extent to which the results of each study reflected participants'
accounts. I considered the audit as a useful technique to address a reflexive
approach. This procedure allowed me to evaluate if my interpretation was close to participants' stories and experiences. On the one hand, I contacted expert judges who were psychologists with expertise in qualitative research. These auditors
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analysed if the themes and sub-themes of each study reflected what participants said during the interviews and focus groups. On the other hand, I contacted each participant in each of the three studies with the aim of assessing if they felt identified with the results of the study in which they had participated. Although not all participants took part of the audit, most participants in Study 1, a half of the interviewees in Study 2, and three participants in Study 3 did. Specific details on the audit procedure and results will be presented in the method section of each study.