Vitae sanctorum: de la hagiografía al relato de vida

In the previous chapter, I described narrative as ‘talk organised around consequential events’ (Riessman 1993 p. 8), or sections of talk (Riessman 2008). I indicated that I would analytically bracket (Gubrium and Holstein 1998) or focus on particular elements of women’s narratives for the purposes of my research while suspending interest in others. Those aspects which I chose to focus on – after engaging with the literature and becoming immersed in the generated data - included an analysis of the themes in relation to place, networks and ethnic identity, and an examination of some of the linguistic choices and devices employed in narrative practice (Gubrium and Holstein 1998). Further, I analysed the structure of women’s narratives in relation to plot, the bringing of the past into the present and the construction of ethnic identity through narrative.

Above, I described the processes involved in generating the data. It is also necessary for me to be transparent in terms of the practicalities of transcribing and analysing the narratives (Riessman 2008) and I discuss this below. Transcribing narratives can be understood to be an act of translation since converting talk into written text involves interpretive decisions about what to retain and omit and this is inevitably incomplete, partial and selective

(Riessman 1993).

I discussed my theoretical approach to narrative analysis in the previous chapter. In practical terms, I analysed women’s narratives of community in Spain in three related ways (Riessman 2008). First I looked at the thematic content, in other words what women said about community and these tended to be in relation to place, networks and identity in Spain. This involved

shaped the focus here) which allowed for categorical exploration within as well as across cases referring to prior theory (see Chapter Five for more detail). The data reflected the thematic categories in the literature on community, although as I mentioned earlier, ethnic identity was privileged over others in the women’s narratives. Second, I looked at how women told their stories, in other words how the narratives were constructed to persuade me (the researcher) of their plausibility. I highlighted in Chapter Two that my focus here was on plot; coherence and the use of time within the narratives (see Chapter Six). Finally, I addressed the ‘who’ of the narratives or how talk was shaped and performed by the teller’s shifting positionalities (Anthias 2002) or identity.

I adopted a theory construction approach from the data in conjunction with interaction with the literature discussed in Chapter Two. There are some similarities with the ‘Grounded Theory Method’ (Glaser and Strauss 1967) though I did not fully utilise this. This approach was useful for me since I share with its proponents (Charmaz, 1983, 1995; Glaser 1978, 1992; Glaser and Straus 1967; Straus 1987) a view of qualitative research being more than intuitive and superficial and a precursor to ‘real’ quantitative data generation. The analytical categories were shaped by engaging with the literature and the data itself. Further, such categories were also produced by my research participants and me as the researcher with a mix of induction and deduction (Stanley and Wise 1990). These emerging categories reflected my

interpretation of the data and the literature (Charmaz 1995). Additional common ground between the Grounded Theory Method and my narrative approach is that account is taken of the context in which data is generated and the reflexive role of the researcher in terms of interaction with

respondents and its influence on the emerging data. Further, there is simultaneous involvement in the data collection and analysis phase of research.

I used open ended questions to generate data and taped the interviews and transcribed them shortly after they took place. I began with a rough

manner. I have given words their ‘proper’ spelling even if mis-pronounced or abbreviated to facilitate understanding for the reader. In terms of analysis, I drew from the work of Doucet and Mauthner (2008) and Brown (1998) on ‘the listening guide’, which involves several (re) readings of a narrative. For the purposes of my research, I applied a staged reading of the narratives. After engaging with the literature on community and identifying the categories indicated above, I then I employed a reading of the interview transcripts which took account of the themes, linguistic choices and devices related to place, networks and identity in order to develop a categorical analysis across cases. I then applied a reading of the narratives which examined their structure in relation to plot, or what brought the disparate elements into a meaningful whole (Czarniawska 1998). I indicated in Chapter Three that I apply the plot typologies the quest and voyage and return (Booker 2004) to the women who wished to remain in Spain and those that wanted to return, and that these are both ending embedded plots (Czarniawska 1998). Using these plot typologies allowed me to examine the purpose of the narratives, that is, how women justified their decisions and actions, motives and agency and how persuasive they were (Riessman 2008) regardless of the ending embedded, that is, whether they wanted to remain in Spain or return to the UK. I described the elements involved in each plot typology in the previous chapter and my analysis centres on how they converge and diverge. In both plot typologies, the central character embarks upon a journey away from their original home, precipitated by a call (Booker 2004) to find a new one. For the purpose of my analysis, these plots diverge in relation to how the central character or

narrator relates to monsters and obstacles, companions and where home is located.

A further reading of the narratives focused on how talk of the past influences perceptions of the present and the future and the role of nostalgia in

constructing belonging to places, networks and ethnic group. I examined how quest and voyage and return plots are linked to time and space (Bakhtin 1984; Skultans 1997) through the construction of an idyll. Decisions about plot were made following my immersion in the data, rather than pre-specified before I began my analysis.

As indicated, I examined themes in terms of place, networks and ethnic identity within narrative. I coded the transcripts in terms of place, networks and ethnic identity and then identified a number of themes within these broader headings. Finally my thematic and structural analysis was grouped under the following headings:

Place: why women chose to leave the UK and migrate to Spain. I framed this in terms of ‘the call’ which precipitated the quest for a new home. I then identified how constructions of Spain and the UK were presented in women’s narratives and how this converged and diverged between the categories identified above.

Networks: how social networks were constructed and social contact with different groups (Spanish people, migrants from the UK, holiday makers) and how these were superficial. Again I highlighted how social networks were constructed similarly and differently between my analytical categories.

Ethnicity: how women presented their own ethnicity and how they positioned immigrants to the UK, the Spanish and expatriates from elsewhere.

In my research, thematic analysis was useful for theorising across all cases to construct theory in relation to community formation through migration.

Examining the narratives in terms of plot enabled me to analyse how the different categories differently constructed structured their accounts and where these converged and diverged. In reporting my findings, I use an example from each category (women who live in Spain permanently and wish to remain; women who live full time in Spain but want to return to the UK; women who live part time in Spain and are happy with the arrangement; and finally, women who have a second home in Spain but do not want to retain it). The excerpts from each category are presented in boxes in Chapters Five, Six and Seven.

This chapter has provided a description of and a rationale for the methods used in generating data about community from a sample of retired British women migrants in Spain. The following three chapters will focus on the findings from my research in Spain and provide thematic and structural analysis of the narratives as discussed above.