My data collection method was in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The vast majority of the interviews were carried out in person, although two had to be conducted on the phone for practical reasons, and one, at the request of the participant, was conducted via an ongoing email conversation. With the permission of participants, interviews were recorded and transcribed by me. Two participants declined permission to record the interviews, and instead I took extensive notes throughout the interview. I kept a research diary around each interview encounter which recorded other impressions gathered from the interview such as participants’ body language and other non-verbal communications (Reinharz and Davidman 1992: 20, 40), as well as my own emotional reaction to what was said and in what manner (Conway 2008: 350).
Qualitative interviewing is a method which has been used extensively to study women’s experiences of violence (Lewis et al. 2002: 50-51), and which has enabled me to gain a good understanding of participants’ constructions of their own experiences and realities. While I did enter the interviews with pre-prepared topic guides and I did prompt participants with the questions on it when there was a lull in discussion, as far as possible I encouraged participants to guide the conversation around the issues which they felt were important, move at their own pace, lead and focus the discussion, and explore their experiences in their own words (Acker et al.
1983: 426; Campbell 2002: 68; Reinharz and Davidman 1992; Skinner 2005: 49; Thapar-Björkert and Henry 2004). If participants raised issues which were not on my topic guide but which they felt were particularly relevant to their experiences, I allowed the interview to continue in the direction they had identified. This interviewing method allowed me both to gain greater understanding of the issues which I had expected to emerge and to remain open to the emergence of unforeseen themes - to think beyond my preconceived notions of what was important and to encourage participants to name and to define their own experiences and realities (Hage 2006: 85). This approach has helped me to expose some of the gaps and misconceptions which underpin much of the more positivist, quantitative research into domestic abuse in military contexts which I outlined in the previous chapter.
80 Rapport
In order to encourage participants to feel comfortable sharing their stories and leading the conversation, it was important to put them at ease as far as possible. Like many interviewers, I invested considerable effort into building rapport. Of particular relevance to military research, as I discuss above, is the notion of the ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ status of the researcher and the participant. While I question the notion of a strict binary between these positions, insider/outsider debates remain relevant to the conduct of my interviews as a participant’s perception of a researcher’s positionality is likely to have an impact upon their assessment of that researcher’s capabilities and trustworthiness, and thus on the narratives they choose to share (Sanghera and Thapar-Bjorkert 2008: 553-54; Thapar-Björkert and Henry 2004: 374-75). Some scholars have suggested that shared social characteristics create easy rapport through an assumption of shared understandings (Conway 2008: 349-50), and have as a result advocated
‘matching’ the social characteristics of interviewer and participant (Conway 2008: 349-350; Imam and Akhtar 2005: 70-72). Others have drawn attention to the ways in which a researcher’s status as either an insider or an outsider in relation to participants is fluid and shifting (Duneier and Carter 1999: 12), and moreover, that its meaning and influence upon the process of the interview cannot necessarily be foreseen (Dwyer and Buckle 2009; Sherif 2001), and have therefore contended that researcher who occupy the “spaces between” (Dwyer and Buckle 2009; Mullings 1999: 340-41) or who position themselves as a “trusted outsider” (Bucerius 2013) are often able to create more effective research relationships.
Reflecting this scholarship, in conducting interviews for this study I experienced my positionality as an insider/outsider as fluid. In some cases, this fluidity was highlighted by the ways in which participants, too, experienced their own location in relation to the military institution in dynamic ways. Victim-survivor participants, as civilian women who have been married to servicemen and, in many cases, whose lives have been shaped in multiple ways by the institution itself, both blur and embody the fluidity of the civilian-military divide. While these participants have never been military personnel, they understand its community and speak its language in ways that I simply do not. In terms of building rapport, I felt that my official outsider status was generally beneficial in these interviews. This is because while it was not the case for all, many participants felt mistrustful of the military welfare services, and in some cases the military community more broadly, in particular around the capacity of both to keep information confidential (see Chapter Six). My status as an outsider seemed to inspire confidence in participants that they could share
81 their experiences and voice their concerns without worrying that others in the community would find out about what they had said (Bucerius 2013).
In interviews with both quasi-military and military support worker participants, it is likely that my status as an outsider may have prevented participants from sharing some narratives with me - for example, narratives which may have encouraged negative press about the institution (Ben-Ari and Levy 2014). In other ways, I think my status as an outsider may have been beneficial in these interviews, because it encouraged participants to position themselves as ‘experts’ on the military.
These participants often assumed that I knew little about the military world and made particular efforts to explain its intricacies to me. It may be the case that this assumption allowed participants to feel that they were in control of the situation, making them more at ease and more willing to share their thoughts. This reflects the experiences of Lomsky-Feder (1996: 235-36), who reports that - as a woman researching in the masculine world of the Israeli Armed Forces - participants assumed that she knew very little about the military, and thus set themselves up in the role of “teaching” her about the institution (see also Bucerius 2013: 702). Moreover, because insider/outsider positionalities are multiple, while I remain an outsider in terms of my relationship with the military institution, participants may have read my position as more fluid in other ways. Baker suggests that her status as a linguist gave her a partial insider relationship with military translators who she interviewed, despite her lack of specific military status (Baker et al.
forthcoming), and similarly, in some of my interviews with support workers (military, quasi-military, and civilian), I think that my experience of working on a domestic abuse telephone helpline encouraged participants to read me, in some ways, as an insider in relation to their professional experiences. For example, although military support worker participants mostly explained military acronyms to me, or apologised if they forgot to do so, most did not explain specialist domestic abuse terminology. This experience highlights the fluidity and multiplicity of insider/outsider relationships and also draws attention to the difficulty of predicting in advance the ways in which these relationships will impact rapport.
While perpetrator participants were also military insiders, the dynamics of these interviews was different again. These were the interviews in which it was perhaps more difficult to build rapport.
A number of female scholars have noted the difficulty of which female interviews may have in interviewing men, who may use the opportunity to harass or flirt with the interviewer (Arendell 1997; Bucerius 2013; Harne 2005: 171-72; Willott 1998: 179-81). Harne has suggested that this challenges the idea that the researcher is always in a position of power over the participant in an
82 interview setting (2005; 171-172). However, this does not reflect my experience - indeed, it was in these interviews that I felt the unequal power of interviewer over participant was particularly obvious. The topic of the interview was the socially sanctioned behaviour of the participant, and the fact that he was an abuser was a pre-condition to the interview (Gadd 2004). Although there were only three of these interviews, I was particularly conscious of the importance of creating a mutually respectful space in which participants did not feel judged, but also did not feel that I was supporting their abusive behaviour or accepting any rationalisations or justifications they may have offered (Downes et al. 2014; Harne 2005; Hearn et al. 2007).
Ethical issues surrounding rapport have been discussed by a number of scholars, from those who suggest that going beyond rapport to friendship may be the most ethical practice (Oakley 1981) to those who consider excessively strong rapport manipulative in that it encourages participants to reveal information that they did not intend to and that they come to regret sharing (Cotterill 1992: 595; Fontes 2004: 159; Huggins and Glebbeek 2003: 364; Maynard 1994: 15-16). This is, of course, a discussion of power, in that it asks how far the manipulation of participants and the objectification of their experiences is avoidable. On balance, I did not feel it was ethical to build a
‘friendship’ with participants in this research, as such a relationship will always be instrumental and to some extent manipulative. Instead, in resonance with Cotterill’s (1992: 596) concept of a
“friendly stranger,” I aimed to create a space where participants felt safe, supported, and believed by a friendly and professional interviewer seeking information for research. While I ensured that all victim-survivor and perpetrator participants were provided with information on support services (discussed below), I did not encourage them to believe that I would be able to provide ongoing support.