Читать книгу Everyday Courage - Niobe Way - Страница 26

“The Listening Guide,” a method created by Lyn Mikel Brown, Carol Gilligan, and their colleagues, highlights the multilayered nature of people’s experiences of self and their relationships as conveyed through interviews.⁹ This method underscores and draws out the complexity of voice and of relationships by paying close attention to the language used by the interviewees. It attunes the reader’s ear to what is being said and also, perhaps, to what is not being said. Moreover, it stresses the relational nature of interviewing, analyzing, and interpreting narratives.

“The Listening Guide” involves a sequence of four readings, each focusing on a different theme or voice. In the first part of my analysis, I undertook the first two readings, and in the latter part, after I created the narrative summaries and the conceptually clustered matrices, I conducted a revised version of the latter readings. The first reading in “The Listening Guide” focuses on how the narrator tells her or his story. As the reader, I sought to understand the story being told by the interviewee by listening for the “who, what, when, where and why of the story.”¹⁰ In this first reading, I also listened for and recorded contradictions or inconsistencies as well as repeated words or images. I looked for places in which there appeared to be absences or revisions. I also recorded the ways in which I responded to the narrator and the story being told, and I thought about the ways these responses affected my interpretations and understanding of the person being interviewed.

In the second reading, I listened to, examined, and recorded the ways in which the narrators spoke about themselves. I became attuned to “the voice of the ‘I’ speaking in the story”¹¹ by locating the references to self throughout the adolescents’ stories (e.g., “I am outspoken” or “I am always worrying about my mother”). Without using preexisting categories to determine self-perspective, the second reading invites the reader to listen to the narrators on their own terms: What are they saying when they refer to themselves? How are they describing themselves? Together, these first two readings enabled me to listen and respond to the adolescents’ stories of self and relationship.