15 - I poems and polyvocality: experiences of using a combined qualitative creative analysis technique to strengthen the voices of research participants and aid reflexivity

Summary

Introduction

We are colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire who studied together in the same cohort for our doctorates in education. While we conducted studies in quite different areas, and used different primary data analysis techniques, we both independently decided to incorporate an additional phase of data analysis using techniques drawn from feminist ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan's Listening Guide method (1993) to construct I poems to strengthen the voices of the people who took part in our research. We have since used this combined approach in several other projects and feel that it has enhanced our approach to data analysis.

In this chapter we present our experiences of taking ownership of our research and allowing ourselves to be creative through use of this combined qualitative data analysis approach. We will illustrate our creative analytic process with examples of how we construct I poems to preserve individual experiences and balance them with a thematic presentation of the collective experience. We believe that a combination of different data analysis approaches can complement each other and provide additional dimensions to analysis and findings. We will also demonstrate how the use of I poems can deepen researcher reflexivity.

I poems and the Listening Guide

An I poem is a type of ‘research poem’, that is to say a poem that has been constructed from and is grounded in qualitative data (Furman et al, 2006). The construction of I poems forms the second stage of Gilligan's four stages of data analysis set out in her Listening Guide. As qualitative researchers, we do not try to reduce the contributions of people who take part in our studies to a single coherent voice. Rather, we try to present the polyvocal, ‘naturalistic, complex, varied, expansive and [sometimes] cacophonous’ world of the several or many voices that have spoken to us (Thody, 2006, p 2).

The analytical steps described in the Listening Guide offer a ‘qualitative, relational, voice- centered feminist methodology’ (Woodcock, 2005, p 49), which we believe can provide further insights into participants’ worlds through the construction of I poems from selected verbatim participant quotes and thus convey a relatable essence of participants’ experiences and preserve the polyvocality inherent in the data (Thody, 2006).