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PHDE0071 -
Qualitative Data Analysis
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this coursework, I affirm that the work is my own and that any material derived or quoted from the published or unpublished work of other persons has been duly acknowledged.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”.
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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.