Page 46 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Talk, tea and tape recorders 39
accounts in the main body of the book. Therefore, the rest of this section is
concerned with explaining some of the processes of analysis in dealing with
the interview material in order to set the context for what follows.

Analysing the interviews
All the interviews were transcribed. This in itself is an act of distilling an
in-the-flesh interpersonal encounter with all the different non-verbal com-
munications that involves, set in a particular place, to a textual reproduction
devoid of tonal and phrasing subtleties. The interviews are rendered fairly
simplistically, without techniques used for conversational analysis (for exam-
ple see those used by Jennifer Coates 1996: x–xiv), as this was not logistically
possible. This more technical form of rendering a conversation also has the
disadvantage of being relatively difficult to read, providing another barrier
to getting a sense of what is being said. I have tried to convey a limited sense
of the tone given – by noting in italics where particular emphasis was given
to words or phrases and noting other expressions, such as laughter. Initially,
I used a computer package (the unfortunately named NUD*IST) to analyse
the material, but found that this limited the analysis in various ways, for
example by breaking the narrative flow within individual interviews.
As a result of these conclusions, I took each interviewee individually and
analysed her interviews, producing an account of each interviewee with an
individual biography and analysis of the interview. In these profiles or sum-
maries, I tried to establish a picture of who the interviewees were, the ways
in which they thought, the discourses they used in different contexts and the
assumptions they worked with. In this way, an attempt was made to examine
the performativity of race, class and gender in the interview encounter. I
explored how they approached questions of ‘race’, class and gender, what
account they gave of their lives, of their childhoods, their experiences of
motherhood and how they went about bringing up their children. Each in-
terviewee was written up and, in these accounts, I drew on my impressions
of the interviewees when I had met them, how they spoke and other aspects
of the encounter that are not caught on the transcribed text. I examined the
way they represented their selves, in particular examining how some pro-
duced narratives of their lives in the interviews while others did not. Those
interviewees who had given second interviews were particularly interesting
in this context. In these interviews, a life history approach was used as a
device to open up the space for interviewees to produce an account or nar-
rative of their selves. The interest here is less directly in the life history itself,
but more in the different modes that the interviewees used to generate mean-
ing and an account of self. The question of silences and avoidances in the
interviews was also important. What did interviewees discuss willingly, and
what did they avoid? How are questions of power and difference alluded
to without being mentioned directly? Once this process was completed for
all the interviewees (with individual summaries sometimes running to over