Читать книгу Rural Women in Leadership - Lori Ann McVay - Страница 31

Having established that the most appropriate form of interviewing for any qualitative study is dependent upon the research question, the methodology employed by Pini (2005) in her research into Australian rural women in leadership set a valuable precedent for this research. The use of general themes and questions as a framework for semi-structured interviews allowed Pini’s participants to give self-reflexive answers about their own experiences as well as advice for aspiring women leaders. This study followed her example through the use of semi-structured, in-depth individual interviews – facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of the respondents’ contexts and experiences in regard to the particular topic of leadership (Hesse-Biber, 2007).

The interview is a method that allows the researcher to maintain respondents’ comments as valid and their experiences as valuable (Brewer, 2000), and helps steer the researcher away from forms of knowledge production that have come to be seen as patriarchal (Little, 2002). As such, interviews produced a wealth of rich data in the participant’s own words (Brewer, 2000) and thus opened spaces that had the potential to reveal ‘feelings, values and internal struggles’ behind the stories told in the interview process (Ni Laoire, in Hughes et al., 2000, p. 87). Reinharz and Chase (2002) recognize the hearing of women’s own words as an antidote to centuries of their masking behind men’s words, and put this method forward as particularly important when studying women. In view of the power struggles present in the experiences of women in leadership, this perspective was notably relevant to the research. Each woman was interviewed in depth once. The use of an interview guide helped ensure that the topic at hand was addressed, while also leaving room for the interviewee to articulate related issues or experiences that she considered significant (Kvale, 2006). The interview guide was adjusted slightly as themes emerged from interviews, producing continuity among the topics addressed and ensuring that the women’s voices were reflected in the questions being asked.