28.3 Method
Interviews in this exploration can
in my opinion be seen as social productions. Working together in active
interviewing, the researcher and the informants construct stories and give
these narratives an interpretation together. Holstein
and Gubrium (1995) state that researchers using active interviewing techniques
should:
Acknowledge interviewers’ and
respondents’ constitutive contributions and conscientiously incorporate them
into the production and analysis of interview data (1995: 4).
Their perspective advocates a form
of research that involves collaboration between the researcher and the
respondents in order to create a process which involves the co-construction of
meaning.
In this exploration it was important
that such a sensitive matter as shame in connection with sexual abuse could be
talked about in groups where the respondents were familiar with each other and
in an environment where they felt secure. It was constructive to have so few in
each group so that all respondents could participate freely. A drawback with
such small groups was the vulnerability of the participants when one or two
were absents from a meeting, or when one member of the group was more verbal
than the others and therefore dominated the group. I experienced both of these
drawbacks, and this gave me valuable research experience. Using active
interviewing seemed to make the participants more relaxed and the group members
could speak freely, in spite of the drawbacks mentioned. One of the employees
at the Incest Centre in Vestfold, Linda, has spoken with many of the other
participants both during and after the study and has the impression that talking
together; sharing narratives in the interviews has brought the users and
workers at the Incest Centre closer together. The way the interviews were
conducted gave a feeling of security. She describes her experience with the
interviews this way:
Linda: It’s
been, in a way, umm, well all the groups say that the way the interviews have
been conducted has resulted in us being more welded together than before. We
have become better acquainted with each other as individuals. That’s the way I
felt. It was really all-right to be in the group I was in. It gave us a whole
lot in return. It’s difficult to explain, but it gave us a, umm ((Bites her
lip)) umm it felt safe and you gave us
umm a whole lot in addition or what can I say. It was a very positive experience.
Linda’s comment seems to verify to a
certain extent that ethical considerations had taken the welfare of the
informants seriously, not only did I need information from them, but I wanted
to carry out the study in such a way that the participants felt they also could
learn something from it. I was hopeful that the interviews were carried out in
a helpful and respectful fashion. It is of course possible that Linda could
feel my expectations as a researcher and gave this response so as to satisfy my
expectations. This is in my opinion a common problem with interviews. The
informant will try to be good respondents by trying to give “the right answers”
and eagerly pleasing the researcher. On the other hand it is possible in my
opinion that participants can come closer to each other when openness and
honesty are present in group meetings. This is what Buber calls “I-Thou”
meetings and has been used in both social work practice and research (Sim 1994;
Itzhaky and Hertzanu 1999; Yassour-Borochowitz 2004).
One of the primary ethical
challenges in using active interviewing was making sure that the respondents
knew what that they had agreed to participate in. It was necessary to repeat
the intention of the study and how the information was going to be used several
times, both before the interviews started and during the interviews. It was
important to maintain a relaxed atmosphere in the interviews so that
respondents could freely ask questions about the study. Still, I was always in doubt about whether
they fully understood the purpose of the study. When is the amount of
information given sufficient? How could I be sure that the descriptions I gave of
my study were comprehensible for my respondents? Another ethical consideration
I faced using active interviewing was evaluating the different tactics I had
used as an interviewer and which the participants used as respondents. Looking
and listening to the many hours of video recordings was a revealing experience;
it showed the many different strategies people use in an open dialog. It was
thus not only necessary to be sensitive to the macro-ethics of the knowledge
produced in the study, but also to the micro-ethics of the interview situation
itself. Although I had these ethical problems in mind throughout the study, I
still believe that active interviewing techniques encouraged frank
conversations and opened up for arguments about what was being said, thereby
contributing to the co-construction of meaning.
Before conducting a qualitative
investigation into the concept and phenomenon of shame, I carried out a survey
with two case groups. These surveys are carried out because I was curious to
find out; in what degree shame-proneness is a phenomenon which at all can be
measured; if people who have been sexually abused have a greater degree of
shame-proneness than university college students; which possible relation
shame-proneness might have to other self-conscious emotions such as guilt and
pride; and to learn how it is possible to investigate if TOSCA-3 really
measures what it intends to measure (construct validity). The test used was the
Test of Self-Conscious Affects (TOSCA-3), which intends to measure shame-proneness,
guilt-proneness, detachment, externalization, and two forms of pride. The
findings from these two surveys, one comprising 201 university college students
and the other 180 adults who had been sexually abused as children, show that
subscale means and standard deviations between the two groups were very small,
suggesting little difference between the two groups. I had expected the
differences between the two groups to be much greater, considering the impact
that sexual abuse has on a victim. But the survey suggests that people who have
been sexually abused have approximately the same proneness for shame and guilt
as those who have not been abused.
The survey also showed that Pearson’s
Correlation between shame-proneness and guilt-proneness was high (r=.68) in the
case group of sexually abused men and women, and moderate (r=.42) in the case
group with university college students. An interesting question which arises here is in
my opinion if the high correlation shown in Incest 2005 can be explained
because of the experiences of sexual abuse which this group has. This question
is examined further in the focus group interviews carried out in the Incest Centre
in Vestfold. The high
correlation between shame-proneness and guilt-proneness might imply that it is
difficult to measure shame and guilt as two independent emotions. I therefore
carried out an exploratory factor analysis. It was not possible, in my opinion,
to confirm construct validity from this factor analysis. There might therefore be
some degree of uncertainty to whether TOSCA-3 really measures what it intends
to measure. This finding needs in my opinion further investigation.
I conclude from these two surveys
that it seems possible to measure proneness to self-conscious emotions such as
shame and guilt, but it is important to keep construct validity in mind when
constructing such tests. It also seems that shame-proneness is correlated to
other emotions in the test. The greatest correlation seems to be between
shame-proneness and guilt-proneness in the survey group of those who have
experienced sexual abuse. The correlation her (r=.68) might suggest that
victims of sexual abuse have difficulty in treating shame and guilt as two
different emotions. This assumption is taken further in this exploration
through the interviews of 19 employees and users of the Incest Centre in
Vestfold.
Kaare T. Pettersen
Reference:
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