Chapter Five: Testimonies of the DCC Members
5.2 The methodological approach
Since this is a qualitative study, a generic approach to qualitative data analysis and interpretation was adopted. The first step was to organise and prepare the data for analysis, which involved transcribing the interviews and field notes.
After transcribing the data the next step was to acquire a general sense of the views of the participants and a sense of the overall depth and credibility of the information.
The next essential task involved the process of coding. Codes are conceptual labels for the function of assigning meaning to descriptive information. Labels are attached to pieces of information, which share a common theme. Using Tesch's (in Creswell 1994:155-156) method of coding, the first step was to gain
129 See http://www.dcc.org.za/?g=praise: a section in the DCC website for people to post their
"praise reports".
a sense of the whole: this involved reading all the testimonies carefully and recording any initial observations. After this I went through each testimony and jotted down themes that emerged alongside the dialogue. Once all the testimonies were read and the themes had been recorded, I grouped similar themes from all the testimonies to form major themes. I then gathered a list of major themes and sub-themes for which I selected descriptive wording, for example the theme "resilience". The testimonies were then coded afresh by a person with qualitative analysis and coding expertise, without access to my initial codes, in order to determine what themes would emerge from a perspective other than that of myself. Once this was done the themes were then verified by verbatim quotations from the testimonies, analysed against the background of my own participant observation at the DCC and located back into the body of knowledge using literature for the purpose of analysis, interpretation and theory building. The credibility of this research was reinforced through the process of member checking, which involved clarifying my records of the testimonies with the participants after the interviews had taken place. This part of the study was also peer reviewed through a series of discussions and debriefings.
5.3 Narrative Analysis
The studying of testimonies can yield a good deal of information about religious and psychosocial experience. Research into the testimony is therefore research into social and religious experience. Yamane (2000) offers a critique of the study of religious experience in his article, Narrative and religious experience.
Yamane argues,
When we study religious experience we cannot study "experiencing"
-religious experience in real time and its physical, mental, and emotional constituents and therefore must study retrospective accounts- linguistic representations- of religious experiences (2000:173).
...We must simply bracket any claims to apprehend religious experience in itself and instead give our full attention to the primary
way people concretise, make sense of and convey their experiences:
through language and in particular through narratives (2000:175-176).
I apply Yamane's argument to the study of testimonies. In the case of the testimony, the actual experiencing of the events narrated by the participants cannot be studied; instead, it is the "retrospective accounts" or a representation of experience that can be explored (Yamane 2000:181). The testimony as a representation of religious experience cannot be understood as a "fixed and transparent object to be measured or classified" since peoples' experiences and reflections on experiences alter according to their circumstances (Yamane 2000:181).
In an article titled 'Your faith has made you well': The role of storytelling in the experience of miraculous healing, Singleton (2001:122) discussed the conventions of story telling:
In order to tell a story of any kind, a narrator must order events in a temporal sequence, describe the role of different characters, ascribe causality and bring the story to a point of closure...In the act of organising experiences according to these storytelling conventions, particular meanings, points of view and interpretations are inevitably privileged, whilst others are suppressed or countered - thus creating a particular understanding of events.
In dealing with the actual stories, the subjectivist approach130 to narratives will be adopted in order to try to assess the psychological and theological forces at work in the narrator. It must be remembered that in the subjectivist approach to life, the story is treated as an expression or projection of the subject's psychological dispositions and dynamics and that the story is a window on the psyche. In this approach the focus falls on the psychological forces internal to the narrator and not the facts of the story. I use the words "story, narrative and The subjectivist approach as one of two life-focussed approaches to the study of narratives was discussed in the section on research methodology in chapter one. The subjectivist approach deals with the interpretation of representations of experience. This approach is preferred over the objectivist approach, which treats the experience as an object for pure description. See Yamane (2000) for a critique of existing methodologies for the study of religious experience. See also Peacock and Holland (1993), Richmond (2002) for more on different approaches to the study of narratives and Ricoeur (1988) for a more philosophical treatment of narratives.
testimony" interchangeably since I employ the same methodology commonly used for the study of life stories and narratives to study the testimonies.