Assignment Cover Sheet Candidate Number: JQHB6 Module: PHDE0071 – Qualitative Data Analysis 2019/20 Essay Title: “I just think it’s the journey that I’ve had” – Preparation for parent support: a narrative analysis Word Count: 5,488 Submission Deadline: 25.05.2020 Actual Date of Submission: 25.05.2020 Student Declaration: By submitting this coursework, I affirm that the work is my own and that any material derived or quoted from the published or unpublished work of other persons has been duly acknowledged. I confirm that I have read the UCL and Departmental guidance on plagiarism. 2 “I just think it’s the journey that I’ve had” – Preparation for parent support: a narrative analysis Introduction “As nations and governments construct preferred narratives about history, so do […] individuals” construct stories as “ways of knowing and communicating” (Riessman, 2005, p.1) about the world. Narrative research takes such stories as the basis for exploring social life. This essay focuses on an individual story and has a dual purpose, in both conducting a piece of narrative analysis, and reflecting on the process of conducting such analysis as a novice. Having set out the context for the research, I provide a short introduction to narrative analysis and describe how my own analysis was conducted. I then re-tell the story that Kate,1 the research participant, told me in response to my questions about her schooling and life afterwards, and discuss some of the issues raised. These include the ways in which she understands both her difficult family circumstances and her professional experience to have helped prepare her for her current work, as well as ways in which her work interacts with some key issues in education policy. I also point to some of the tensions in the ways in which Kate sees herself. In view of the second aim of the essay, I include a substantial reflexive section, considering in particular the issues around unexpectedly strong emotions arising in interviews. Background and research questions Kate is the manager of an innovative parents’ centre, The Haven:1 a former caretaker’s house on a primary school site in a relatively deprived London borough. The house has been renovated to act as a base for a variety of family activities (examples include ‘stay and play’ for parents with young children, massage therapy and parent and child cooking sessions). The centre is the subject of my planned doctoral research, exploring what parents and staff perceive to be its impact on their relationships with each other, and on the children. Parents’ engagement in their children’s schooling has been viewed as vital for supporting children’s attainment (eg Goodall et al., 2011), and in closing the ‘gap’ in attainment between disadvantaged children and their peers. Damien Hinds (2019), then Secretary of State for Education, recently claimed that “in the very earliest years, gaps appear in development […] and about a fifth of the difference in development of cognitive ability […] is to do with parental engagement”. Such policy discourse has been criticised for over-emphasising parents’ individual responsibility for educational outcomes (Vincent 2017), rather that of than wider structural factors (Mowat, 2018) and the differing resources that particular social groups can draw on to support their children’s learning (Edwards, 2010; Reay, 2010). Reay (2017) has highlighted how attempts by schools to involve parents in children’s learning too often result in widening, rather than narrowing, inequalities. 1 Pseudonyms. Kate’s is self-chosen. 3 The Haven is unusual in its strong emphasis on parent wellbeing, particularly at a time of austerity and policy focus on academic attainment. I recently began to observe activities at the centre, and to conduct interviews exploring its aims; the informal interview considered here was added to the end of a more formal interview with Kate. I had met her several times, and was struck by her passion for the centre and curious about her background and what had led her to this role. I therefore asked her to tell me something about herself, resulting in the data presented here, which I analyse in order to answer the research questions: How does Kate view her past experiences as preparing her for the role of parents’ centre manager How does she construct her identity through the narrative Narrative research If the purpose of qualitative analysis generally is to “enquire deeply into the meaning of different situations and different people’s understandings of the world” (Bold, 2012, p.2),2 and if narrative research in particular is interested in how narrative can be used to construct identity (Elliott, 2005), it seemed that this form of analysis was appropriate in facilitating the kind of deep enquiry that would enable me to address my research questions. Narrative is simply another way of understanding the world: “narratives carry traces of human lives that we want to understand […] [they] can help us describe, understand and even explain important aspects of the world.” (Squire, Andrews & Tamboukou, 2013, p.2). This is so not only for the audience or researcher: in telling their stories, people make sense of their experiences, “claim identities, and ‘get a life’” (Langellier, 2001, in Riessman, 2005, p.1). Indeed, in psychology, constructing a personal narrative has been seen as part of the development of a sense of self. This sense of “building personal identity and agency” (Squire, Andrews & Tamboukou, 2013, p.7) is characteristic of the holistic, ‘humanist’ approach to narrative, in which attention is focused on the individual. In this way, narrative research “complements and counteracts the ‘culture of fragmentation’ (Atkinson, 1992) that is so characteristic of data analyses based on coding and categorizing” (Coffey, 1996, p.80). By contrast, more post-structuralist approaches to narrative emphasise that stories and identities are formed by multiple subjectivities rather than “singular, agentic storytellers and hearers” (Squire, Andrews & Tamboukou, 2013, p.4). In this case, the importance of language and social interactions in identity formation is also emphasised, and “the storyteller does not tell the story, so much as she/he is told by it” (Squire, Andrews & Tamboukou, 2013, p.4). Whatever the approach, studying an individual’s story also provides an awareness of that individual within society (Plummer, 1983 in Elliott, 2005). As Riessman (2005, p.6), after C. Wright Mills, argues, “narrative analysis can forge connections between personal biography and social structure – the personal and the political”. There is no single approach to conducting narrative analysis (Elliott, 2005; Squire, Andrews & Tamboukou, 2013). The study of narrative, according to (Mishler, 1995), 2 Pagination for this publication refers to the downloadable pdf of chapter 7, ‘Analysing Narrative Data’, in Bold, 2012. 4 p.88), is “a problem-centered area of inquiry” which includes great diversity. The focus might be on “telling” as well as the “told” (Mishler, 1995, p.90) – for example, on the structural or linguistic features of a story – or on the context of the telling, such as the interaction between speakers (Riessman, 2005) and the social function it performs (Mishler, 1995). All approaches, however, require the researcher to “construct texts for further analysis, that is, select and organise documents, compose field notes, and/or choose sections of interview transcripts for close inspection.” (Riessman, 2005, pp.1-2). In the case of this research, I collected the initial data through a fairly opportunistic interview. I had previously mentioned to Kate by email that if we had time after my interview with her for my masters dissertation, I would like to ask her to tell me something about herself in connection with another assignment, if she was willing. At the conclusion of the formal interview I again explained about the assignment and asked if she would mind telling me her story. She spoke for around eight minutes, and this data forms the main focus of the analysis. However, concerned that it might be too slight for the purposes of the research, I decided to supplement it with some field texts (Creswell, 2005). These were the opening section of the formal interview, where Kate talks about how she came to manage the centre, and also my field notes from the day of the interviews. In this research I take the primarily humanist approach identified above, and the position typical for thematic analysts that language is “a direct and unambiguous route to meaning” (Riessman, 2005, p.2). While not embracing a post-structuralist approach, I am also interested in the meanings behind what is implied, or left unsaid. I agree with Tamboukou (2013) that narratives constitute, rather than merely representing, realities and shape the social rather than – or perhaps as well as – being determined by it. As Riessman (2005, p.6) also argues, “Narratives do not mirror, they refract the past […] Narratives are useful in research precisely because storytellers interpret the past rather than reproduce it as it was.” In this connection, I do not know how much Kate has already worked to interpret her past and ‘package’ this version of her story, or whether her account was spontaneous. As I reflect below, I cannot ignore the fact that she has apprehensions about the research which may influence her storytelling. On the other hand, my questions were relatively few and broad, leaving space for Kate shape her account. My “re-storying” (Creswell, 2005) below, of course, adds a further layer of interpretation, as Mishler (1995, pp.117-118) argues: “It is clear that we do not find stories; we make stories. We retell our respondents’ accounts through our analytic redescriptions. We too are storytellers and through our concepts and methods […] we construct the story and its meaning.” (Emphasis in original) Analysis I began by producing a largely unfocused transcript of the main narrative interview, and immediately found it hard to decide what transcription conventions to use. This is no surprise, because transcription influences analysis and vice versa (Elliott, 2005) and, as a novice, I had left both variables undecided at this point. I settled on a system using three columns (for the speaker and occasional timings; speech; and any notes about how things were said), and an adaptation of some of the detailed 5 transcription conventions set out by Silverman (2001), simplified once I had decided to focus primarily on content. I read through this transcript several times, not least because I wondered whether I had enough data to carry out the research, before choosing to include the other field texts. I then explored whether it was possible to apply Labov’s (1972, 1982 in Coffey, 1996) framework to the data, initially thinking that it did not fit; indeed, it has been pointed out that people rarely give the kind of strict chronological account that would perfectly fit the framework (Mishler, 1997 in Elliott, 2005). However, I discovered that I could split the main interview into two sections, one focusing on Kate’s childhood and school years (lines 186-270), and one on her life subsequently (273-376), applying the framework to each. This made it easier for me to start considering some of the issues raised in the account; I thus found that, as Riessman (1993 in Coffey, 1996) argues, beginning with attention to structure can help avoid a narrow focus on content and provide a ‘way in’ to the text. I then chose to focus in particular on the opening section of Kate’s story, because in telling this she had quickly become upset and started to cry, which suggested that it was the part of her story that held much meaning for her. To aid this focus I re-transcribed this section (up to line 270) using a method based on that of Gee (1986) to break the text into “idea units” (Chafe, 1980 in Gee, 1986, p.394) (see Appendix). The units consist of single clauses (or less), each containing one new piece of information, grouped in related ‘stanzas’ (Mishler, 1995). These begin to indicate levels of meaning of the text and enable us to focus on how the speaker chooses to construct her story, selecting and ordering the events to produce her account (Mishler, 1995). I restricted the re-transcription to this highly personal section of the data, since this method is time-consuming and ill-suited to extended narrative (Elliott 2005). Nonetheless I found that, as I re-transcribed, I both began to identify themes in the narrative and to be moved by it, partly due to the similarity of the stanzas produced to poetry. I found that, as Reissman (1993 in Bold, 2012, p.3) suggests, the transcription process became part of the analysis, and that the “poetic structures” produced helped me to “see much more clearly the meaningful statements that the interviewee was making about her experience”. I include one example of this below, although for ease of reading, other quotations are set out in conventional lines, with pauses and hesitations removed. I therefore used a mixture of structural and thematic analysis, rather than focusing on the interactional (Mishler, 1995) or performative (Riessman, 2005) context of the narrative; this enabled me to focus partly on the “telling” and partly on the “told” (Riessman, 2005, p.2). However, my main interest remained in what was said rather than how, and with this in mind I set about re-storying (Creswell, 2005) Kate’s account. This is presented below, interwoven with discussion of some of the issues raised. As a child, Kate loved school, and her attendance record was perfect. She characterises herself as being part of a “popular group”, “a little bit challenging, but 6 also […] very well liked by the teachers”. Her mother was involved with her schooling, although her father was not, in keeping with typical patterns of parental involvement in schooling, particularly in working-class communities (Lareau, 2000; Reay, 2005) such as that in which Kate grew up. She did well academically and must have seemed to the school to be an ideal student. But throughout her childhood, her mother experienced domestic violence at the hands of her father, an alcoholic. In this section from my re-transcription, Kate sets the scene (‘orientation’ in Labovian terms), describes her father’s violence, and ties the experiences to the outcome for her mother. “So when I was a little kid I lived with my nan a lot of the time with my mum and my brother and erm yeah there was a lot of police presence you know my- my dad would smash the house up and the cars and so it’s no surprise that my mum is now a counsellor.” The family were police-protected and were moved, but one day Kate’s father followed her home from school and smashed up the new house. The house had to be secured with emergency boarding, and other children were told not to play with Kate and her brother. Kate’s school was completely unaware of all this; as she says, “we never aired our dirty laundry anywhere”; “nobody would ever have known what went on”. Her mention of “dirty laundry”, along with references to being “the family where none of the [neighbourhood] children were allowed to go near” hints at the considerable stigma and shame she must have experienced. Yet throughout this painful section of the narrative, and in contrast to the section that follows, Kate never describes how she felt – only the events. However, the way in which her eyes fill with tears almost as soon as she begins talking about her father; her slightly drawn-out “yeah”, which ends her first sentence about the violence and which seems to stand in the place of many words; and a short evaluative (in Labovian terms) section in the middle of this part of the story, leave no doubt as to its negative impact on her: 7 “…so we’ve had a lifetime of it but eventually my mum did manage to get rid of him. And, erm, so that has definitely had, like, reoccurring demons for me…” Kate describes her mother as a “warrior”. This description of her mother as a figure of power is striking; it is her mother, rather than the police, who “got rid of” her father, and she has clearly played an enormous supporting role in Kate’s life, including, presumably, ensuring her school attendance. Kate has continued to rely on her, even up to the present, as I record in field notes: “she says she was feeling quite nervous about the research because it feels somewhat as though The Haven is under scrutiny, and this is hard for her because she is hard enough on herself as it is. She says that her mum tells her she has no need to feel like that, because ‘what’s it to you’ (words to that effect) what the research says ” This crucial role of maternal support, seen also in the role played by Kate’s grandmother (presumably her mother’s mother), contrasts not only with the behaviour of her father but also with the fact that Kate makes no mention of a partner in her story, even when she later mentions her children. Kate achieved good GCSEs and continued to sixth form, but at the age of 16 she had an argument with her mother and moved into a flat with an 18-year-old friend, expecting to have “the best time of her life”: “I thought I was really really […] clever”. In fact, she would have a migraine every night, her mother would come to help and beg her to return home and, without her mother to get her out of bed, she would be late every day for school, even though “I never ever wanted to be late” – an uncomfortable departure from her ‘ideal’ student status. While she describes this as “a really bad time”, living in the “dirty old flat” which was as “rough as anything”, she is grateful now that she had this time with her friend, who later died from leukaemia. After a year of A levels, she decided on the spur of the moment to go with her friend to college instead, even though she had not enrolled: “I was very much like that – a very […] laid back, fly by the seat of your pants kind of person.” Kate took an NVQ in Business Administration at college and then worked as a secretary at Burberry, “did a bit of temping” and worked for a window company, before having her first child at the age of 20. She went back to work when he was four months old; she has four children now and says that she has “always worked”: “I like going to work, and I don’t ever feel like I could ever not be at work”. As with her emphasis on her ‘idealness’ in terms of school attendance, Kate seems to construct herself here as an ideal citizen- worker (Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2012). While her recent career has involved supporting “disadvantaged” families, and she stresses her empathy for them, she constructs herself as ‘other’ in the sense of never having missed school (which would have marked her as a ‘problem’) or been unemployed (and thus reliant on state welfare). However, she does not claim any sense of superiority in this; rather, the knowledge that “I turned out ok” (field notes) gives her hope for people going through similar circumstances. 8 She worked for five years at a local secondary school, including in the special needs department, having been appointed from a very competitive field. Here she decided that she wanted to do more to support the families of children with special needs. This led her to apply for a job at a charity supporting carers, working with parents of children facing school exclusion. She characterises this as “a really really positive time of my life, because we were seen, in [borough], to have a really good result for families who were disadvantaged” in terms of overturning school exclusions, on various grounds: schools were not meeting children’s needs, or “were just trying to get rid of these kids.” This relates to a known political issue, whereby schools, lacking resources to provide extra support for children with special needs and mindful of the potential negative effect of such children on league table positions, seek to remove them (Gill, Quilter-Pinner & Swift, 2017). Kate was involved in a project with City Hall on these issues, which resulted in a publication for tuition centres on parental engagement – the focus of her role now. Kate ends her story with – in Labovian terms – an evaluation and coda that bring us up to the present: “And that was really good. Erm, and then that led me to here.” The field texts allow some expansion on this. Kate was employed at the current primary school as a Parent Support Adviser, working alongside an Attendance Manager – a dynamic she describes as “good cop and […] bad cop”; “she’s hard, and I’m soft”. The reason for her ‘softness’ was that “I came from a field of work where you know that attendance is not the sole root of the problem […] there’s always something else”. Because of this, she would feel “very awkward grilling a parent for their responsibilities.” This tension is apparent in her next comment, which seems to switch back to the perspective of the school, with its focus on attendance: “Although the child being at school is the crucial element that we got sorted.” Goodson (1995 in Coffey, 1996, p.78), points out that narratives can be used to reinforce dominant voices, or can highlight “oppositional stories” from those who might otherwise be silenced, and both sides of this seem to be evident in Kate’s account: the blanket insistence in education policy on attendance as the key to attainment and life chances (Department for Education & Gibb, 2016), and the acknowledgment that some parents struggle with issues so large they prevent them from fulfilling their “responsibilities”: “because there’s things going on, the parent’s got mental health, or they’re just lonely at home. So there’s so many different factors.” Her empathy here is based on her professional, rather than personal, experience. In addition to experiencing this tension in her job, Kate found it very difficult to manage the both the attendance and the parent support work within her three-day working week, which led to “some real low moments” and taking “some time out”: “I always felt like I wasn’t doing a good job […] I always felt like I was chasing my tail with that.” This sets the scene for a change of direction. When the plan for The Haven was put forward, members of staff suggested many ideas for its use; when one questioned who would manage it, Kate said, “Ooh – sounds like the perfect job for me”. She therefore claims agency in her current position: “I kind of just put myself out there, and then […] that’s how the role became mine”. Here Kate portrays herself as similar to her spontaneous teenage self. Managing the centre is now her entire role, in which she has been given considerable 9 freedom: the headteacher “didn’t put any restrictions” and said, “I don’t want to micromanage you”. This seems to have two sides for Kate: she has free rein for what she calls her “massive list of ideas”, but on the other hand she has “been left with this big house!”, which seems weigh heavily on her. Her solution is to tell herself that if she was doing something wrong, the headteacher would tell her (field notes). Although the issue of the tension in her job role is now resolved, she still hints at a sense of inadequacy, describing herself as “hard enough on herself as it is” (field notes). At several points in her story, Kate implies that her difficult childhood has made her who she is (I interpret her words “I think […] it’s actually a product of me” to mean this). It has prepared her for her current work: “I kind of think my role, the empathy, the […] making people feel welcome, I think stems from the way we were as a family”; “I […] feel like, I’m a non-judgemental person cos I know, full well, how we were”. As with her mother’s “journey” meaning that she has ‘ended up’ as a counsellor, she seems to see the course of events as almost inevitable or fated, claiming it is no surprise “how I’ve ended up here”, in a role that, while “rewarding”, can also mean she becomes burdened with other people’s cares: “[it] can sometimes be me taking on people’s challenges […] Because I just think that it’s the journey that I’ve had.” She presents herself as both the ideal person to do her job, and at the same time as somewhat oppressed by the work: carrying the weight of it and lacking reassurance that she is doing well, other than that provided by her mother. Reflection This was my first attempt at narrative analysis and it immediately raised a number of issues for me, particularly around ethics. This was a semi-opportunistic interview, snatched in a few spare minutes, although as Swain (2018) argues, this need not mean it does not yield valuable data. Nevertheless, I decided to supplement it with further data to provide something substantial enough for analysis. It was this snatched quality that particularly troubled me when, very soon after starting her story, Kate began to cry: was I to blame by not having prepared properly, or asked my question more sensitively My field notes from the day reflect my confusion: “At this point I felt a mixture of strong feelings: shock that she was crying; concern (what have I done !); elation – and then immediately guilt – that this was a ‘real’ thing, not just a nice neat little narrative [but something that would] give me something ‘meaty’ to write about; concern that Kate was ok and that I do the right thing ethically in terms of checking whether she wanted to go on.” I felt the kind of split described by Goodrum & Keys (2007), between maintaining a professional focus on the interview, and realising that here was a human person in need of comfort – a need precipitated by my questions. On reflection, I wish I had offered her some words of comfort as well as offering to stop the interview; Goodrum and Keys (2007, p.255) report one participant advising, “If your human instinct is to say, ‘I’m so sorry, that must have been terrible’, it would go down real well.” 10 I had been aware as I asked about Kate’s parents that it is always risky to ask about a stranger’s family background – a fact reflected in my stumbling over the question – but this experience has reinforced my wish to tread carefully in future. While “all interviews are potentially emotional experiences for participants” (Mitchell & Irvine, 2008, p.35), and although I was satisfied that Kate was happy to continue with the interview and for me to use the data (I checked verbally at the end of the interview and again in a follow-up email), I would want an interviewee to be better prepared in advance for the possibility that potentially sensitive topics could come up, and to consent to this. Kate twice remarked that she had not expected to get upset, the second time being after I turned off the recorder; it was at this point (see field notes) that she said that her experiences gave her empathy with, and hope for, the people she is working with. At this point her eyes filled with tears again, and I said, “Oh, you’ll start me off!” Again I was aware of a split within myself: while it was true her tears might have made me cry, I was also aware that in saying this I was building rapport with her – something that will be valuable for our ongoing research relationship. I immediately felt guilty again for thinking I might profit from her emotion. Holland (2007, in Mitchell & Irvine, 2008) refers to the “ethics of empathy” in this connection, and the possibility that researchers might use ‘empathy skills’ to encourage participants to say more than they might really want to. Conversely, as Mitchell & Irvine (2008) go on to point out, feminist literature stresses the importance of researchers developing relationships of trust and reciprocity with participants, suggesting that my desire consciously to build such a relationship was not in itself wrong. I remarked above that I found the poem-like lines of my re-transcription moving and that they enabled me to see meaning in the data. I also found it helpful to use Labov’s (1972, 1982 in Coffey, 1996) framework as a starting point, to help me see begin to see this meaning: for example, to see how Kate’s words, “not at one point did I miss school, I had great attendance, so it just shows what a warrior my mum really was […] Yeah, and still is. Yeah” act as an evaluation of the story so far and a coda bringing us up to date, so providing a clear end for the first section. This then enabled me to select that section for further analysis, at which point I chose to move my focus from structure to content as I believed it would yield richer results, and I was concerned I might spend too much time simply labelling elements of the narrative. However, in the light of Riessman’s (2005, p.6) warning that “narrative research can […] pretend to offer an ‘authentic’ voice – unalloyed subjective truth”, I would not want to lose sight of the fact that I am also a storyteller here (Mishler, 1995). It was I who categorised the elements according to Labov’s (1972, 1982 in Coffey, 1996) framework, and then ordered and grouped the lines and ascribed meaning to them – meanings that Kate herself might not have agreed with. I have also talked about her “constructing” her identity, showing an epistemological assumption that identity is something we can construct for ourselves and project to others. Furthermore, Riessman (2015) argues that we must take note of the potential influence of the settings where narratives occur, as well as the resources that interviewer and participant bring to those settings. On one hand, The Haven might represent a liminal space in this respect, being neither school nor home. As an outsider in ‘her’ centre I felt very much that I was on Kate’s ‘turf’, and that she was 11 the one with power. On the other hand, I cannot ignore my positioning as a middle- class researcher and a representative of a powerful outside institution (the university), especially given her revelation that she is nervous about the research, and my knowledge (from an earlier session) that because I am studying for a PhD, she sees me as “very clever”.3 I have found it interesting to focus here on narrative; given that my data represented a life story from one individual, this seems to have been an appropriate approach, although I found it strange to focus in such detail on one story, whereas in other research I have typically compared several interviews in a more thematic approach. This meant that I sometimes wondered whether I was able to draw out anything of value: was this all narrative, and no analysis On reflection, if I had taken an approach based on performative analysis (Riessman, 2005), this might have allowed me to look more closely at how Kate constructed her identity through storytelling and my role as her ‘audience’ in this, although I had felt that this would require more detailed notes on the non-verbal aspects of the telling than I had available. Nonetheless, this process has sensitised me to the ways in which people talk about themselves and the identities they project, and I hope to notice and draw on this more as I progress to my doctoral research. Conclusion This necessarily remains a partial account because it has not been through a crucial stage in determining its validity: the “re-storying” has not yet been verified by Kate herself. This is partly due to reasons of time, and also because I am nervous about the effect it might have on our future research relationship for Kate to read someone else’s speculations about her identity formation – no doubt a strange experience for anyone. I also worry that my use of academic language would alienate her just at a time when I am still seeking to build the relationship. For these reasons I have chosen not to share the account with her yet, although should I want to use it for any other purpose, I would do this. Based on the assumption that language reveals meaning, I have focused on the ways in which Kate chooses to
