A LANDSCAPE TO LIFE HISTORY RESEARCH
7. WHAT DID I DO IN THE RESEARCH
In this study I accepted the stories told by the participants. I was not looking for forensic truth but wanted personal truth. It was my responsibility as the researcher to interpret the experience. The issue of truth is dealt with further in chapters four and eleven.
to conduct a structured than an unstructured interview. My first interview schedule comprised questions around the various shaping dynamics: politics, culture, society and individual. A colleague, Renuka Vithal, from the University of Durban-Westville, agreed to be interviewed under the pilot schedule. I felt that the interview jumped around different time periods and I was unable to bring coherence to the interview process.
I was then exposed to the Thompson and Perks interview schedule and felt more comfortable with the idea of a "biographical approach" (Levinson as quoted in Plummer 1983) or structured interview schedule for this stage of my training in life history work.
Using the interview schedule developed by Thompson with Perks (1993), I developed an extensive interview schedule [Appendix C]. I piloted this instrument with Keith Lewin a colleague from the University of Sussex.
The revised interview schedule had a chronological set of questions. The initial questions were around early life, parents, siblings, grandparents, religion, politics, social class and how these impacted on the educational life history. The next set of questions related to primary and high school and the influence of the teachers, principal and the school milieu. Thereafter there were questions related to university life up to the time of gaining the doctorate. This data formed the main part of the stories. There was a set of questions related to work and work institutions; the research community and reflections related to how race and gender issues impacted on the trajectory.
Although I had a structured questionnaire, it was more as a memory jogger than a rigid plan. I asked a general question at the beginning and most people, in their answers, covered many of the questions.
7.5. Interview technique and mechanics of the interview process
During the interview I used a tape recorder (Sanyo Mini Cassette Recorder).
found tape recording and listening to the interview to be difficult. I spent lots of time and energy wondering if the tape was recording. This meant that I wasn't always totally listening to the interview and may have missed some chances for probing deeper.
I set up the tape recorder between the participant and myself and explained the project. I reminded people to talk about their experiences and started off the interview with questions from the interview schedule. I listened, empathetically, to the answers of the participants. My initial response was to have a conversation and recount my experience. I tried this a few times and found it got in the way, took too much time and
distracted from the purpose of the interview. I decided to listen to the participant and when the tape recorder was off I would add a bit of my biography or relate an incident from my life. With some of the women, at the end of the interview process, I suggested going out for lunch and then we would share experiences.
During the interview process I would listen and gIve, what I thought, was adequate time to answer. There were times when I rushed onto the next question before the participant had finished, but they were assertive enough to say 'I would like to go back to a point I made earlier' or say 'I have not finished answering that'.
I scheduled the interviews for three x 2 hour sessions. Initially, I wanted three consecutive sessions thinking that this would be convenient for the participants because then we could get the story 'at one sitting'. As I started the interview process I realised that this was tough on me to listen and digest and even tougher on the participants. They were in highly pressurised jobs and taking up two hours of their day for three consecutive days was a major chunk of time. For two of the participants (Romilla Maharaj and Phuti Ngoepe) I made special trips to places a long way away from Durban (Cape Town and Pietersburg). I conducted the complete interview on consecutive days.
For people from Durban, Gauteng and University of Zululand the interview process sometimes stretched over a few weeks. One participant's interview was difficult to schedule over a few weeks. It took a few months to complete the whole interview.
Appendix D indicates the time for each of the interviews.
Many of the participants were in high level public sector positions and were articulate about their experiences. During the interviews there was a problem when they would go into an intellectual, abstract mode and express opinions and theories about issues. I was interested in their subjective experiences and interpretation of those experiences. I would then re- direct them to talk about their experiences. As the participants knew they would not have any anonymity they to be selective in what they said. They were in public positions and the experiences and reflections they chose to share would be determined by the impact this had on their present public positions. Here I took the stance of an empathetic listener and did not cross question experiences. If there was an indication that certain things would be private, I chose to respect the private domains and did not pry. I was led by the participant about how much they wanted to tell.