Sunday, 17 May 2015

Interviewing for Education and Social Science Research: The Gateway Approach,
Carolyn Lunsford Mears, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009, page 5

Mears specifically enrolled into a doctoral program at the University of Denver in order to pursue this academic study, recognising that standard research methodologies would be inadequate.

At this point, I realised that I simply could not do justice to the participants if I merely summarised or paraphrased their words for consideration. I did not want to just tell what happened to them and their family. I wanted to reach across the trauma membrane and evoke an understanding of what it felt like to actually be living the immediate and ongoing consequences of this experience.

The 'normal' academic process of coding interviews, reducing them to phrases and code words in an abstract and anonymous analytical process would fall far short of Mears' aims:

This meant that I needed a way to communicate the emotions, the fears, the confusion, the sense of loss and the many other responses that are brought on by exposure to trauma.

Preach it, sister!