Читать книгу Black Women's Health - Michele Tracy Berger - Страница 13

My investigation into how African American mothers and daughters discuss and experience issues of health draws on focus group interviews and field research conducted between 2004 and 2010. The community of respondents were 24 pairs, each composed of a self-identified African American mother and her identified daughter. I was deliberate about construing the identifiers “mother” and “daughter” as broadly as did my respondents, to accommodate nontraditional, less formal, and nonbiological mothering relationships.74 The daughters that were recruited were between the ages of 12 and 18. The average age of the mothers was 35. The average age of the daughters was 14. There were five mother focus groups and five corresponding daughter focus groups, for a total of 48 participants. Each of the mother and daughter focus groups were conducted on different days. The appendix provides more demographic information about the study participants and additional methodological notes.

The focus groups took place in a variety of locations, including public libraries and community centers. When mothers and their daughters arrived at the study site, daughters were escorted to one room and their mothers were escorted to another room. They had separate semi-structured conversations organized around a set of questions defined primarily by several themes—health and wellness, adolescence, mother and daughter relationships, and experiences with health-care providers. I alternated at times between being a facilitator and moderator across mother and daughter groups. Taking on these roles gave me different vantage points throughout the research period. The focus groups usually lasted for two hours to two and half hours, sometimes longer.

As Richard Krueger notes, this process in focus groups is evolutionary for participants and as research unfolds, that influences how the researchers conceptualize their work.75 As I began this research, my preference was to keep questions broad and allow them to “ripen” and develop over time. For example, I asked the mothers generally: What have they shared with their daughters about becoming a young woman? This question evolved to having the mothers tell us what they have shared with their daughters about the idea of intimacy and how they might envision their daughter’s first date. Thus, although the majority of questions were asked of all groups, some were probed further in some instances and others not as much. I note this in the analysis.

Focus groups were transcribed and then coded by me. After identifying major and recurrent themes and patterns, I performed detailed coding of the data. This involved several readings of the transcripts from each focus group, paying attention to one particular dimension each time (e.g., exercise). Each time I read through transcripts and my notes, I became more and more intrigued with how mothers (in the mother groups) and daughters (in the daughter groups) talked about their definition of health as well as their reflections on conversations about the same topics in their families. I read the transcripts to cross-check themes, their interior layers, and emerging contradictions.

Drawing on grounded theory and informed by my knowledge of literature on the topic, I concentrated on exploring the themes that emerged inductively from the focus groups and field notes. I also worked to understand the perspectives of the participants being expressed and paid attention to the complex ways that mothers, in particular, influenced each other, changed their narratives, and revealed their hopes and dreams for themselves and their daughters.