This blog is written by Dr Jane Doka, Researcher in International Education and Development, Centre for the Study of Global Development (CSGD), The Open University.
“Those things I told you were just [false]statements. Isn’t it I was representing girls who live like that?” – Participant X
I had just finished data analysis and was about to write up the findings for my study, which explored the agency and education experiences of six girls in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) who were characterised as ‘marginalised’. These girls had been recruited onto a vocational education and training programme by an international organisation, which sought to improve their lives through training them in skills for their livelihood. The findings were, to me at the time, a compilation of a neat and compelling narrative about these girls’ lives, which resonated a lot with the broader literature on girls’ education – mostly how vulnerable they are, how they lack access to important resources and how they lack voice and agency. I drew this narrative from these girls’ stories told in their own voices, a very important part of my methodology in this study. Nothing prepared me for the moment when one of the participants in my study (Participant X in the excerpt above) revealed to me in a WhatsApp message that all she had told me during my two long interviews with her was a misrepresentation and her narrative about being a ‘marginalised’ girl was not true!
To say I was shocked and confused is an understatement. In that state of panic, I went back to the data, carefully observing my conversation with her and all the girls in this study, and to my horror, I realised that the stories of five out of six girls had inconsistencies and contradictions. At that point, disappointment set in, and I felt disappointed with myself, the participants, and my study. How did I miss that?
My claim to having taken a constructivist stance in this study was tested by this revelation. I had gleaned from some authors that constructivism denotes a relativist ontology, whereby there are multiple realities that are socially based and local and depend on the one who holds them. In this instance, my approach as a researcher was to (subjectively) interpret the participants’ experiences and perspectives, thereby taking an interpretivist epistemology. What I had not anticipated was whether it matters if what the participants report is true or not and if the intention is to tell their story through their own voices, how this can be achieved when the participants have misrepresented themselves.
After I recovered from my initial shock, I discovered that there were many important lessons from this experience, lessons which have shaped me as a researcher. For now, I will share this one: it is important for us as researchers to remember that the interview process is not neutral, and this has further-reaching consequences than we are consciously aware of. There are power dynamics at play, which are negotiated by the interviewer and interviewee both during and after the interview. For instance, typically, it is the interviewer who rules the interview, where the interview is an instrumental, even manipulative dialogue, in which the researcher has a goal and an agenda and maintains the exclusive privilege to interpret and report what the participant has said. Inherently, the expectation is that the interviewee will tell the interviewer what they want to hear.
However, less emphasised, and often assumed during research, is the power that the participant holds. Not only do participants have the power to consent or not to the study, to choose to respond to a question or not, but they also have the power to select and transform details of their lives to suit the narrative that they want the researcher to remain with. In my case, the participants exercised their power by presenting the persona they wanted to present and telling me the stories that they wanted to tell me, whether the stories were misrepresented or not. Their power certainly impacted me during data analysis and how I interpreted and reported the findings.
Now, to the golden question: when it comes to reporting the findings, does it matter whether what the participants said is true or not? I think this is subjective to the researcher and their goals. For instance, I realised in revisiting what it meant for me to take a constructivist approach that my goal as a researcher was not to find or tell the truth because truth is indeed relative. I discovered when I engaged this line of thinking that the contradictions and inconsistencies of the participants in my study told an even more powerful story, though different from what I initially thought. In her work about ‘hearing’ girls’ voices, Khoja-Moolji (2006) emphasised that it is important to be open to diverse narratives about their lives rather than to reduce their voices to a homogenous narrative. For me, the complexity that came from the unexpected discovery underscored one of my strongest contributions about ‘marginalised’ girls recorded in my thesis as I interpreted and reported all the stories – the truth, the half-truths, the outright misrepresentation.
Does it matter to you if what your participants tell you is true or not?
