Another visit from the nephews...

We had another visit from our nephew this last weekend- and his younger brother too. We made another video of their trip, which saw us visit the harbourfront where there was a circus festival going on, and the city farm near our house. Lots of fun. We made another video of the weekend, this time about power rangers, and I got another chance to hone my skills of video editing and telling a story- albeit in a much different tone and purpose than my research will be. I haven't shared it with them yet- so no reaction to report. But I think they'll like it...

Proposal defended

A short while ago I defended my proposal in front of my committee, and am now applying for ethics approval to be ready to start collecting data. I am going to be interviewing around 6-10 participants, up to 3 times each. Each participant will be an immigrant who is willing to talk about their experiences hosting friends or relatives. I will try to target my recruitment so that I can get a variety of people from different regions of the world. The first time I meet each person I hope to ask them about their hosting experiences, as well as relevant other stories relating to their immigration experience and changes in perceptions and behaviour after the hosting experience. I'll ask them before hand to think about collecting any photos, memorabilia, or other paraphernalia that will help them explain their stories. If it seems appropriate I will suggest that the participant and myself go to a place of significance for them related to their hosting experience- a park, a neighbourhood etc. that they went to with their visitor and where they had a good time. From these two meetings I will put together their story in video and text form. I will do this for all the participants and then attempt to re-produce an overarching meta-narrative of their combined experiences. I will ask to meet each individual for a 3rd time to show them what I've constructed from the prior two meetings and will ask for reflection, clarification, and approval from the participant of what they see and read, and integrate this back into the interview. By showing each person the entire narrative from all participants it is hoped this may inspire some virtual conversation between the participants that can be fed back into the narrative in an engaging way. I'm following a narrative analysis approach, a methodology that seeks to understand and portray expereinces that are shared as stories, and then re-told as a complete narrative in a research form. The idea is that to tell a whole story maintains the context and meaning throughout- whereas many other methodologies seek to compartmentalize parts of stories into themes, narrative analysis is interested in the whole. For more information here are some great articles and books to read. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Glover, T. D. (2003). Taking the narrative turn: The value of stories in leisure research. Loisir Et Société,26(1), 145-167. Larson, C. L. (1997). Re-presenting the subject: Problems in personal narrative inquiry. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(4), 455-470. Mishler, E. G. (1986). The analysis of interview-narratives. In T. R. Sarbin (Ed.), Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct. (pp. 233-255). New York, NY: Praeger Publishers. Ollerenshaw, J. A., & Creswell, J. W. (2002). Narrative research: A comparison of two restorying data analysis approaches. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(3), 329-347. Ong, W. J. (1982). Oral remembering and narrative structures. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Analyzing discourse: Text and talk (pp. 12-24). Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Polkinghorne, D. E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(1), 5-23. Shotter, J. (1993). Conversational realities: Studies in social constructionism. London: Sage Publications Limited.