BNIM Group.
I received an email from Carina in New Zealand who always asks really good questions. As I've done before, I'm sending a version of my response around the BNIM group so that others can join in if they wish to.
We've just finished a really good BNIM Intensive and are preparing for one in NZ in September and going to advertise later ones in London in November and February. I hope you all received the just-sent version 3.1 of the 'Short Guide to BNIM', expanded slightly in the BNIM-buzz that always (for me) follows each course (not to speak of the need for a good night's sleep).
Send your news too!
Best wishes
Tom
EMAIL TO CARINA:
Hello, Carina. You have a knack of posing million$ questions! I need more info from you in order to respond even half-way adequately. But here goes!
on 16/6/05 3:50 am, Carina Meares at [log in to unmask] wrote:
Hi Tom,
I have a couple of questions for you.
Firstly, what (if any) is the relationship between the theme statement of the narrative as a whole, and the thematic field which emerges from the TFA?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'the theme statement of the narrative as a whole'. Until you give me examples to work from, I can't respond.
Are you talking about the relation between the two subsessions? You might be talking about the relation between the TFA performed on subsession 1 and some 'theme statement' (of whom) derived (how) from both subsessions put together,
Are you talking about 'the narrative as a whole' wherever you find a PIN (Particular Incident Narratives, not Reports, in DARNE terms)? Here you would be talking probably about PINs interpretation as relating to some larger entity (eg the thematic field).
Or is it all about something else?
More concrete info and examples, please!
Secondly, how does the microanalysis contribute to the overall analysis?
It can do this in a number of ways.
(Not by us), it has been used before starting to do a TFA, just to get some hypotheses flowing to fertilise the TFA before you start it.
Second, it can be used when you think you have pretty well grasped the 'Gestalt' of the lived life, of the told story, or both, but only pretty well: there's still this puzzling or anomalous bit of transcript or bit of a relationship or something that you can't quite fit. So you zoom in on a relevant bit of verbatim transcript.
Third, it can be used when you are caught between two overall hypothesised Gestalts (or structural hypotheses) and you can't decide between them. In this case, you try to see if a micro-analysis can advance the debate (hopefully showing there is a 3rd position which transcends and rectifies the earlier two partial views).
For fun (I think this is legitimate; it's certainly a nice by-product!).
The third question is more complex.
I am having difficulty moving from a description of the flow of the interview, into a more structural account. The difficulty, I think, can be attributed to two things:
- I am uneasy at going beyond the interpretation of the interviewee, a process that seems to involve moving into the realm of the psychological, about which I know very little.
I am not certain about what you are saying here. Examples needed here for me to understand what you mean by "going beyond the interpretation of the interviewee".
You might mean that somewhere (in an Argumentation, or an Evaluation, or your synthesis of many of her A/E explicit statements) there is a self-theory or a world-theory that is explicitly or implicitly that of your interviewee. You have registered it (rather as I did in the early sections of my study of LOLA in FQS), and you feel that it is somehow wrong to have a (researcher) perspective on the interviewee that the interviewee herself does not put forward or which you could predict she would not share.
If this is the case, you are in a pickle. BNIM always does tend to generate an 'understanding of the case' that goes beyond the self-understanding (self-theory) of the interviewee. If you are unhappy about doing this, then you probably should not use BNIM interpretation procedures but only do BNIM interviews, otherwise you will find yourself coming back into this predicament. Indeed, if you only want the interviewee's interpretation of herself, her life and her world, then narrative interviewing may not be the most appropriate sort of interview: you might want an interview strategy aimed at eliciting argumentation (explicit world views and self-theory) or at ethnographic description (see Spradley on the Ethnographic Interview 979?). Perfectly good things to do, and better for other purposes than BNIM.
I'm putting this as strongly as possible (sorry if it feels aggressive) because a carrcature (like political caricatures) can sometimes be helpful in clarifying a situation. The model of the 'self' as defended (Hollway and Jefferson etc) implies that there are ALWAYS certain truths about each of us that the subject in question is 'defended from knowing' but that others can in principle can more easily know. If this is true, then 'greater objectivity' always involves "going beyond the interpretation of the interviewee" and just re-cycling people's self-interpretation must be an exercise in maintaining blindness!
More soberly, I try to handle this problem of respecting but also going beyond the interviewee's interpretation in my consequently very long FQS article on 'Lola'. You might find it helpful to revisit it.
I don't really know what to say.
All the above may be a useless rant if actually your phrase means something else! In which case, my very genuine apologies.
Perhaps your "feeling uneasy" has to do with feeling that you are infringing somebody else's discipline. It isn't -- as I thought above -- that you feel politically-ethically uneasy about this 'going beyond'; it is rather that you feel technically-scientifically impertinent in apparently going into a 'discipline area' (Psychology) for which you are not formally trained.
If this is the sort of 'uneasiness' that you feel, then my response would be that you have followed where the BNIM procedures of interpreting interview data have led you and your panel and come up with whatever formulation about the patterns of the lived-life, of the told-story, and of the evolving 'case-history' of the person in question seem to be justified by the data interpreted by those people according to those procedures.
You will end up with a 'case summary' that will make some statements and give some account of the continuities and discontinuities of the 'historical subjectivity evolving in their evolving historical context' that you were studying. This may amount to some sort of 'statement about the subjectivity', which can be regarded as infringing on History, on Psychology, on Sociology or any other police-guarded realm that you or your colleagues have anxiety-attacks about.
However, provided the 'statement about that subjectivity-in-context' (whatever the historical commonsense terms you use that best communicate what you have found) is couched in the terms and with the examples that you think are 'most true' to what you did find, you have done what you can do to the limits of your capacity.
We are all good-enough describers of 'inner worlds' and 'outer worlds' just by being human beings with some formal training in some social-science discipline which has enabled us to make explicit the understandings of people and life-worlds that are part of being human. In a sense, just by being yourself, you must inevitably "be a Psychologist, Historian, Sociologist" sufficient to make interesting statements about somebody whose BNIM-interview you have BNIM-interpreted.
The danger comes only afterwards. It comes when you try to turn the findings from the case or cases formulated in terms of 'categories and theorisations emergent from within the interpretive procss' (grounded particularising case-theorising) into a statement for an Academic/Scientific Discipline Community of which you are not a part.
If you write your 'statements and communications' in the language and modes of presentation that you are most comfortable with (see p.313 onwards of my textbook on this), and let people from research communities come and rework them themselves, then you don't have a problem. If you try to rework stuff from your personal idiomatic Theory-Language into somebody else's Theory-Language (with which by definition you aren't comfortable) then you should feel VERY uneasy because then you will be going beyond your area of competence into a zone which is your area of incompetence and somebody else's area of super-competence, and boy will you get it in the neck!
- I wonder how valuable, ultimately, it will be in clarifying issues around gender and migration at the sociological level I am looking at.
No comment: see what emerges!
This feels like quite a turning point in my work, and Iım not sure how to best move forward from here. I have discussed it with the supervisor who is around and supportive of my use of BNIM, and I am sure in the end (because I have to, really) I will make some kind of choice about how far Iıll take the method, but I am interested in your opinion on this.
I hope the above comments are useful, Carina. I've realised that there's a tinge of irritation in this email and I've wondered why. I think it's because we've just finished a Short Course Intensive and I think I wanted this first day of not-teaching to be devoted to something completely different. On the other hand, I wanted to give you a response as quickly as possible (and have found it interesting to think about the issues): so there was friction between the two impulses. So I'm sorry about the 'tart' note in the above.
Looking back at the email, I realise that I haven't properly addressed the transition between "a description of the flow of the interview, into a more structural account" and I haven't got the data to do it justice in whatever case you are struggling with and the time (today) to do it justice in more general terms. If you send me the document which has your "description of the flow of the interview" (TFA or something next) and an account or document re the tribulations of moving towards a more 'structural account", I'll be able to respond more economically and usefully. Yesterday, in the BNIM intensive course, we were talking about the shift in BNIM from thinking that a Holy Grail of a description of "the structure of the case" could ever be achieved to thinking what forms the account of "the evolution of the case-history" could usefully take, and how to move from a concrete 'history of the evolution of the case' (which tries to show how a man who lived his life like X did come to tell his story like Y) to some attempt to grasp some 'underlying dynamics' that could be inferred as the 'secret' of that surface history. All we have are 'presentational experiments' here, which look at what 'description of dynamics' of that 'case evolution concretely described' would make sense for different audiences. Back to the question of a more discipline-formal Theory-Language that you feel comfortable with and know that your Audience will, too [see above].
As before, since these are general issues, I'll send a slightly modified version of this to the BNIM group.
Do come back to me on all this,
Best wishes
Tom
END OF EMAIL TO CARINA
Any contributions you could make to these issues would be really helpful. It isn't just me and Carina who have to struggle with them, I'm sure!