Page 38 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Talk, tea and tape recorders 31
Finding interviewees

For the main study, I interviewed 25 women over a period of 9 months,
between June 1997 and March 1998, with ten respondents interviewed
3
twice. The interviewees were contacted through a variety of means. Ini-
tially, I made contact through nurseries, where the organisers were asked
to give out a sheet explaining that I wanted to interview parents about ‘so-
cial identity, particularly race, ethnicity and national identity (but issues of
class and gender are also important to me)’. This was the least successful
method of contacting people. I also spent time at some playgroups and one
4
o’clock clubs (after having obtained permission from the local authorities).
At the clubs, I would chat with women and ask if I could come to interview
them at a later date. Some initial contacts were also made through friends
or members of my family who knew mothers in the two areas and arranged
for me to interview them. I also asked interviewees if they could put me in
touch with any of their friends or neighbours. This was the most productive
way of contacting interviewees and, as a result, I ended up with at least
two groups of women who had multiple interconnections, in that they were
friends or neighbours with other interviewees or their children went to the
same schools.
The overlapping nature of the sample of interviewees indicates the way in
which there is no attempt to achieve statistical representativeness. Nor can
the interviews be necessarily regarded as representative of the interviewees’
lives. They are analysed at a particular moment in which certain representa-
tions of their subjectivities were produced. Nonetheless, as I have argued
above, these particular moments of motherhood provided rich material on
identity and subjectivity, as well as racialised, classed and gendered practices.
The inter-relations between women in the same groups enrich the sample
as it offers a multilayered perspective on a relatively small geographic area.
I was able to interview several women who saw each other regularly in the
same streets. They used the same libraries, swimming pools, shops, nurs-
eries, playgroups and schools. In some interviews, the women used very
similar discourses and referred to discussions that they had had with other
interviewees or referred to the experience of others. As will be clear, the ma-
jority of the interviewees are middle class, although there were differences
in their occupations, outlooks, material circumstances and backgrounds. 5
This was at least partly the product of the way people were contacted, as
I found that middle-class interviewees were more likely to introduce me
to other potential interviewees. This may be a result of the different ways
that social networks function, but I suspect is more due to the fact that
middle-class interviewees found the interviews a more positive experience
than others and were more likely to be prepared to invest in the research
process (class differences in the interview process will be discussed more
fully later in the chapter). In any case, in examining dominant identities or
experience, the middle classes seem an appropriate place to start. They will
be the direct focus of some chapters, in particular Chapter 6 on the practices