VISTA DE INTERACCIÓN

No researcher can ever be truly neutral or detached, in the sense that they are implicated in the interview process (as has been mentioned already). Interviewers are implicated in the research process, since what is under study is the social world and reality itself of which the interviewers are a constituting part, and they co-create knowledge to some extent with the interviewee. As well as this, since any societal interaction carries with it certain power dynamics, this must also be addressed. Of course it is impossible to create a laboratory- style condition in which to undertake social research, yet the explicit unpacking of and reflection on these dynamics can help to contextualise the gathered data. Especially as a part of the Estonian community of Scotland I cannot detach myself from the research. In this sense I therefore consider my position to be that of an ‘insider researcher’, a researcher “who shares a cultural, linguistic, ethnic, national and religious heritage with their

participants” (Nowicka and Ryan, 2015).

While there is a debate in social science whether researchers with similar socio-

demographic characteristics should interview people or not, it has been argued that cultural affinity can bring many positive effects to the table – for example allowing the interviewee to open up more and feel at ease (Legard et al., 2012:140). As Nowicka and Ryan (2015) have shown in research on Irish and Polish migrants, assumed commonality of ethnic origin might break into many different positions, based on age, education, or gender of the researcher and her participants. In conversation, then, some positions facilitate, while others might hinder mutual trust. At each of the research stages, both the researcher and her participants negotiate these positions actively and in relation to each other. A researcher might strategically use different techniques to create such temporary

commonalities in conversation, for example by abandoning academic jargon or by dressing in a certain way.

According to these authors there is a danger of methodological groupism which can be seen in “prioritising one particular kind of difference—most commonly the ethnic or national—over other categories of difference” (Nowicka and Ryan, 2015). In my opinion, as an ‘insider’ to the group, I had easier access to the participants and their experiences due to our shared language and common cultural background. While I shared a common ethnic background, language and culture with my interview respondents, there were other social cleavages (such as social position and status, educational background, age and gender) which I did not share with many of the respondents. I would argue that overall the shared language facilitated the interviewing process and helped to build rapport with the

informants. As we will discuss further in Chapters 5 and 9, for many Estonians the Estonian language is a constituting part of their identity and conception(s) of home. This language-based connection thus proved to be an invaluable asset in my research, especially as the majority of my respondents did not feel confident in their English language skills. In my opinion this would have meant that English language based research in this specific field would have had severely limited responses, and thus a much more limited amount of data would have been collected overall.

The notion of insider-researcher is not as clear-cut as it may appear at first sight. In some cases people might have struggled with revealing their real thoughts to me for this same reason, as the Estonian language context was tied to ideas of familiarity and home. It is possible that I was also considered to be too familiar, and that this familiarity could have created feelings of shame and impeded my informants from discussing topics that would cause shame (for example feeling like they had been unsuccessful in their endeavours). Legard et al. (2012:160) explain that interviewees might seek approval of their views, actions or past decisions from researchers in general, as this is very typical thing to do in a social setting. This feeling of familiarity could have also led the subjects to want to please me and concentrate on things they thought were expected from them even more, fulfilling these expectations, as well as perhaps having expectations of things from myself as the interviewer in return (help with filling out forms, for example). The researchers further explain that neutrality is the most effective response, and that both favourable and adverse

comments should thus be avoided (Ibid.), which is the advice that I followed in my research in order to limit the chance of this happening.

The importance of keeping power-relations in mind and unpacking and reflecting on them was something I tried to do throughout the research process. Indeed, depending on social status the interviewees might have felt like my position as a researcher gave me a more powerful position (Legard et al., 2012). Furthermore, my involvement and my status as organiser of certain Estonian events might mean that my interviewees might have decided not to tell about those events in their interviews or changed the information they gave knowing that I have been involved. As one of my interviewees responded to my question about which events she took part in: “you know, those events you were organising“. I certainly found it much easier to recruit students or professionals for my research, and it was more problematic to reach out to more diverse groups, for example those in low- skilled jobs or on welfare payments. I benefited from being an organiser of several non- academic events in Glasgow (e.g. picnics, informal meetings, cultural events) which gave me credibility and trust among Estonian migrants. While having stressed the importance the shared common cultural/societal space of the Estonian language, I often also felt as an outsider during the interviews, having never experienced many of the encounters of my interviewees. These have included financial hardship, unemployment or doing

underqualified jobs, as well as wartime hardship and being a refugee. Laura Morosanu’s (2015) article about doing research on co-ethnic migrants shows that sometimes age, gender, migrant status and societal position together with different experiences of

migration, may be even more important than a shared ethnicity, in this regard. A researcher can be at the same time an insider and outsider, or multiple insider, or multiple outsider in multiple fields of life.

Morosanu (2016:5) hoped to avoid being ethnically biased by choosing her starting point as not “an ethnic group, implying entities bounded by solidarity, shared identity, aims and mutual recognition), but individuals from a particular category (i.e. with shared ethnic background), with the aim to explore the varied contexts in which ethnicity or other factors shape their experiences and the ways in which they narrated them”. For capturing a more diverse migrant population, she used different backgrounds (forums, FB pages – both ethnic and non-ethnic) to recruit the participants for her research. This difficulty in

there was no Facebook group for Estonians when I started my fieldwork, I was not able to use this channel to recruit more diversely and had to rely on ‘snowballing’.

Methodological nationalism has been criticised by social scientists as the “naturalization of the nation-state”, viewing countries as “the natural units for comparative studies, equate society with the nation-state, and conflate national interests with the purposes of social science” (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003:576). Methodological nationalism thus “reflects and reinforces the identification that many scholars maintain with their own nation-states” (Ibid.). Arguably the label of ‘methodological nationalism’ is “being thrown back and forth among the discussants as a mark of shame” however, while the social sciences have largely denounced the viewpoint of methodological nationalism as a sin, “we all become

unintended sinners the very second we try to grasp the nationstate’s fundamental features and the problematic nature of its position in modernity” (Chernilo, 2011:100). While nations are certainly not the definitive institutions of human identities “to be traced back endlessly in history,” nevertheless national identity is the “unrivalled form of social identity in modernity” (Ibid.:102), therefore while being aware of the fallacies of blind methodological nationalism and of the reification of the nation state as a primary unit of analysis and measure of society, I have nevertheless concentrated on the Estonian nation and (to some extent) nation-state as the measure of analysis because of its enduring importance as the basis of identity, especially amongst migrants abroad. As explained, the label of ‘methodological nationalism’ is hard to shake, and while it is certain that

awareness of the issues and debates surrounding the place of the nation-state in the world and society are important, nevertheless it is also a ubiquitous element of social science reserch. As Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2003:576) remark on this point: “The paradox of the current debate on methodological nationalism is that no one admits being committed to it, and yet its presence is allegedly found in every corner of the contemporary social

scientific landscape”.