This chapter traces a process of revisiting a field site, a problematic of gendered work and care, and a small group of participants roughly a decade after a first phase of research in a study about primary caregiving fathers. This revisiting process led me to rethink my knowledge making practices, including the data analysis approach that I had originally used and further developed in that work: the Listening Guide. The story guiding this chapter is about how I tried to analyze the second phase of interviews (2009–2014) with the same data analysis approach (the Listening Guide) that I had used for the first phase of research (2000–2004). It was a method that I had worked with and co-developed for two decades, but was no longer working for me, mainly because my epistemological and ontological moorings had shifted. Recognizing that the Listening Guide had been developed in a particular context and was infused with specific, albeit more implicit than explicit, theoretical, epistemological, and ontological assumptions, I realized that I needed to realign this approach to the second phase of data analysis with my own evolving epistemological and ontological thinking. In fact, I had to remake the Listening Guide method, and this remaking had implications for how I conducted my data analysis processes. I address these issues in this chapter.
The case study informing this chapter is part of a 14-year-long qualitative, ethnographic, and longitudinal research program conducted mainly in Canada, but recently in the United States, on households with fathers who self-define as primary caregivers (stay-at-home fathers and single fathers) and mothers who are the main breadwinners (for details, see Doucet, 2006, 2015, 2016, 2018a). The research program included a series of interviews conducted between 2000 and 2004 with 70 stay-at-home fathers and 12 mother/father couples and follow-up interviews conducted about a decade later (2009–2014) with six of the mother/father couples (individual and couple interviews; for more details, see Doucet, 2018a). The two phases of research shared (a) a similar set of questions, (b) a visual and participatory method for collecting data on household divisions of labor (the Household Portrait; Doucet, 2006, 2016, 2018a), (c) the use of ATLAS.ti qualitative software (to read for theoretical themes across transcripts and to construct memos while analyzing and writing), and (d) attention to reflexive and relational knowing, subjectivity, and narrative, albeit in different ways between two phases of work in a longitudinal study.
In this chapter, I start by providing a brief overview of how I used the Listening Guide approach in the first phase of the project. Second, I describe my parallel project of rethinking my epistemological and ontological commitments, detailing how this affected my approach to knowledge making, narratives, concepts, and data analysis. Third, I demonstrate some of my process of remaking and using the Listening Guide data analysis approach.
In the first stage of my research (2000–2004), I was guided by one version of the Listening Guide, a data and narrative analysis approach to in-depth interviews, initially developed by Carol Gilligan, Lyn Mikel Brown, and colleagues at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Brown & Gilligan, 1992). This approach has had different names (e.g., a Reader’s Guide, a Listener’s Guide, and a voice-centered relational method) and varied iterations across time in different projects, disciplines, and countries (for an overview and history of the Listening Guide, see Mauthner, 2017; Mauthner & Doucet, 2003). I learned the Listening Guide approach in a small data analysis group led by Carol Gilligan over a period of 17 months (1992–1993) while I was a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge.
Following that period of intensively learning and working with this approach, I continued to use and further develop the Listening Guide in collaboration with Natasha Mauthner (e.g. Doucet, 2006; Doucet & Mauthner, 2008; Mauthner & Doucet, 1998, 2003). In a nutshell, our approach to the Listening Guide utilizes four readings of the interview transcripts broadly framed as attending to (a) reflexivity, (b) narrative, (c) subjectivity, and (d) structuring contexts. The process thus calls for at least four readings of interview transcripts “each time listening in a different way” (Brown, 1998, p. 33) and also, ideally, listening to the corresponding interview tape as a way to return to the multi-sensory quality of the interview relationship. There is also a strong focus on researchers conducting their own interviews so that they develop and maintain relationships with research participants through the data collection and data analysis phases of research.
In my first research phase, I conducted four readings of interview transcripts using the Listening Guide. The first reading had two parts: one that focused on the central storyline or plot and a follow-up reading that added a reader-response reflexive strategy (Mauthner & Doucet, 1998, 2003). The second reading was for subjectivity, tracing the “I” (or central protagonist) in the narrative. My third and fourth readings extended the analysis from the research subjects and their narratives to their nexus of social relationships and then into wider structural relations and theoretical analyses.
As recommended in some of the early versions of the Listening Guide (Brown & Gilligan, 1992), I used a “worksheet” technique (using different colored pencils for each reading). I did all the readings separately, working on a hard copy (paper) of the transcripts with wide margins in which to make notes for each of the four readings. At the end of this process, I went through the transcripts again, reviewing my four readings, and I developed case study stories for all 12 mother/father couples and for eight fathers; for the latter, I attended to diverse characteristics (i.e., single, gay, and/or new immigrant fathers). Upon completing my four readings with the Listening Guide, I used the computer-assisted qualitative software program ATLAS.ti to code the theoretical themes developed from the final stage of my Listening Guide readings and to create research memos, which guided my writing.
Next, I briefly explore how I did these readings, using the case study of Dennis, a single, mixed race (Aboriginal/Chinese), low-income father of one daughter (aged 9 at the time of the interview) as an example (Figure 6.1).
My first reading of fathers’ interview transcripts began with a reading for plot or narrative. I read interview transcripts using a colored pencil to highlight recurring words, themes, events, protagonists, the central plot, subplots, and key characters. I used a different color for each reading to more easily view and compare the four different but parallel readings across the two versions of the Listening Guide. Although these colors vary each time I do the readings, in Figures 6.1 and 6.2, I used the following colors: pink and purple for the two phases of Reading 1, green for Reading 2, orange for Reading 3, and blue for Reading 4. Each of these different colors reflects the unique interpretation being carried out in each reading (discussed in this section and the next three sections).
The second dimension of this first reading was a reflexive one in that it:
involves a ‘reader-response’ element in which the researcher reads for herself in the text. She places herself, her background, history and experiences in relation to the respondent. She reads the narrative on her own terms, listening for how she is responding emotionally and intellectually to this person.
(Mauthner & Doucet, 1998, p. 126)
This reflexive reading attempts to maintain a continuous relationship with research participants and provides a concrete way of “doing reflexivity” (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003, p. 418). Using the worksheet technique, the respondent’s words are laid out in one column and the researcher’s reactions and interpretations are laid out in an adjacent column (Figure 6.1). This reading examines how the researcher’s “assumptions and views might affect her interpretation of the respondent’s words, or how she later writes about the person” (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003, p. 419).
The second reading attends specifically to the particular person in the interview transcripts—to the way that person speaks about her/himself and about the parameters of her/his social world—“rather than simply and quickly slotting their words into either our own ways of understanding the world or into the categories of the literature in our area” (Mauthner & Doucet, 1998, p. 132).
For this reading I again used a colored pencil to trace the instances of “I” in a hard copy of the interview transcripts. I then worked with the interview transcripts on a computer to distill these into an “I story” or an “I poem” (Gilligan, Spencer, Weinberg, & Bertsch, 2003), which is a streaming sequence of “I” and “we” statements (for an example, see Table 6.1). A key purpose of this reading was to focus on how the interviewee “speaks of herself before we speak of her” (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, pp. 27–28).
This second reading led me to highlight several important themes that guided my work over the next decade. For example, in the first research phase, I argued that this type of reading, and the related I poems, helped to illuminate how fathers spoke about themselves as men and as fathers and how they navigated the “shoulds” and “oughts” of fathering and masculinities. Their feelings of being judged as “failed males” in terms of not earning and of being under sporadic surveillance as embodied actors moving on female-dominated terrain (Doucet, 2006) were also uncovered though this reading.
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Dennis: I poem (constructed from beginning of interview transcript) |
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I’m half Chinese, half Native I grew up on a reserve I had my hair permed… I was Hawaiian … Somalian… I was passed for Greek, Italian … Yeah, it’s gotten easier… Her Mother and I didn’t get along… I found out that she was pregnant with her after we had broken up… I just told her that I’d be there for her as a father… I didn’t want to separate the two kids … I tried to do that for awhile and then I decided to come from Winnipeg to Toronto, I figured there was nothing for me to do out there and I had to do something good for myself… I came to Toronto… I was going to school, I had a job… I flew up there and picked her up, flew back, spent Christmas … She was six… I spent most of the time bringing her up, If I was working, I was working… I would be jumping back and forth from work and home So, we bonded pretty quickly. Her Mother wasn’t … a very nurturing person … I sent her back out there… I had called back a couple weeks later She was at home by herself at about eight o’clock … ten o’clock at night… I was trying to call my father and the police and so on to get them over to the house… I’ve heard rumors about it before… I got a private investigator … I called social services, I called all her old neighbours and family that knows what she’s like … I decided okay, I’m going to fight for custody… I had decided that I wasn’t telling her family … I figured they’d all just up and disappear, That’s the kind of people they are. I was doing this… I went through that this summer. So, social services got on their butt really hard… She jumped up screaming … shouting … swearing to give her to her father Cause he wants her anyway, and walked out… All I had to do is get my lawyer to do up the papers, I went out there, She signed them. And that was that. |
Source: Andrea Doucet, Do Men Mother (2nd ed). Appendix C, University of Toronto Press, 2018. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
The third reading of interview transcripts, which I developed with Mauthner, was informed by feminist theoretical insights on relational concepts of subjects and selves (Mauthner & Doucet, 1998, 2003). Recognizing the eminently social and relational dimensions of parental subjectivities, I traced participants’ intimate relational worlds by focusing on friendships, social networks, and social support, underlining with a different colored pencil any references to these on the hard copy of the transcript (Figure 6.1). In the case of Dennis, I read for indications of his relationships with his ex-partner, his extended kin networks, other parents, the various institutional actors who were central in his children’s daily lives (e.g., teachers, health care workers, other caregivers) and the social networks he created (or not) for his daughter.
Finally, in the fourth reading, I explored intersections of class, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender while focusing on structured power relations and dominant ideologies. Broadly speaking, this reading was informed by fundamental principles gleaned from structuration theory (Bourdieu, 1977) and “relations of ruling” (Smith, 1987). This fourth reading moved away from a local, particular, micro-level, subject-centered emphasis toward a macro-level, structural, material, theoretical, and ideological/discursive focus. This process led me to make particular sociological and structural arguments about my research participants. For example, in the case of Dennis, issues of gender, ethnicity, and class mattered in his parenting; this was especially evident in his minimal access to financial resources and social capital and his circumstances of having lived on an Aboriginal reserve and then making the transition into low-income housing in the city. Ideological conceptions of fathers as breadwinners and mothers as primary caregivers also played a role in Dennis’s constant search for a girlfriend to help him care for his daughter. Writing notes in the margins of the hard copy transcripts and through my ATLAS.ti coding, I read for theoretical issues of embodiment, masculinities, the relation between gender equality and gender differences. I also began to use ATLAS.ti memos to assist me in writing up several case studies that bought together my interpretations and analysis. The themes of these readings and the case studies all became central in the book (and other publications) I wrote based on this research (e.g., Doucet, 2006).
Through the years 2009–2014, while I was conducting fieldwork for a second project on breadwinning mothers and caregiving fathers (including the case study of my revisiting fathers and mothers that informs this chapter), I also worked on a parallel project about rethinking knowledge making practices. My evolving approach to knowledge making was underpinned by a wide set of performative, ecological, non-representational, and ontologically relational resources. More specifically, I worked closely and diffractively with the writing of feminist philosopher and epistemologist Lorraine Code (2006) and with Margaret Somers’ work on non-representational narratives (1992, 1994) and her genealogical approach to concepts (Somers, 1994, 2008). This led me to develop an ecological and non-representational approach to knowledge making, concepts, and narratives (for details, see Doucet, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c).
In relation to knowledge making, an ecological approach underlines how researchers are responsive to and responsible for their participation in dialogically constituted narratives and unfolding subjectivities and worlds. An ecological approach shifts our research work from gathering and representing data to “intervening” in (Hacking, 2002) and “intra-act[ing]” (Barad, 2007, p. 33) with data and with research subjects and their worlds. More broadly, this is a non-representational approach to method (Doucet, 2018c; Law, 2004; Mauthner, 2017) wherein methods, including data analysis methods, are not neutral techniques for gathering stories, narratives, or experiences, but are, rather, performative. Put differently, methods are imbued with particular ontological and epistemological assumptions about narratives, subjects, knowledges, and realities and these assumptions matter in terms of what narratives and knowledges are brought into being.
From this perspective, rather than study representations per se, researchers work with a “politics of possibilities” (Barad, 2007, p. 46) with the recognition that there are always many possible narratives that we can construct as scholars. This means attending to the concepts that inform our work, examining their histories, relationalities, and, where possible, their genealogies (Somers, 2008), and sometimes developing new conceptual narratives (Doucet, 2018a). There is a profound ontological shift from searching for findings to reflecting instead on how we partly make these findings. This shift led me to rethink how I approached narratives, the Listening Guide, and my data analysis processes.
My aim in this section is to highlight some key dimensions of Somers’ (1992, 1994) approach to non-representational narratives and what I call, more broadly, an ecological approach to narratives (Doucet, 2018a). This approach builds partly on Code’s ecological thinking and partly on Somers’ (1992, 1994) work on non-representational narratives and ontological narrativity, through which she argues that most approaches to narrative analysis assume that narratives reflect, represent, or impose a narrative structure on lived experiences, life stories, or realities. In contrast to this, non-representational approaches define “narrative and narrativity as concepts of social epistemology and social ontology” (Somers, 1994, p. 606; emphasis in original).
Working broadly within an approach that entangles epistemology and ontology, Somers promotes a multi-layered approach with various dimensions and types of narratives. She argues that there are at least three kinds of nested narratives: (a) ontological narratives; (b) social, public, and cultural narratives; and (c) conceptual narratives.1 The first type, “ontological narratives,” describes “the stories that social actors use to make sense of—indeed, to act in—their lives” (Somers, 1994, p. 618; emphasis added). For Somers, these are not representations. Rather, they are what theorists describe as agential, performative, and generative; they are made in particular conditions of possibility and they make and remake narrative identities (see Reading 1 [1]). Ontological narratives are intricately tied to particular conceptions of subjects and subjectivities. Intersecting with longstanding poststructuralist concerns about how researchers aim to uncover subjectivity or experience and see subjects and subjectivities as fixed, ontological narratives focus on unfolding subjectivities and narrative identities (Ricoeur, 1985; Somers, 1992, 1994). As Somers (1994, p. 618; emphasis in original) notes: “Ontological narratives make identity and the self something that one becomes” (see Reading 2).
Social, public, and cultural narratives highlight how the stories that people tell us are constituted by and unfold within “intersubjective webs of relationality [that] sustain and transform narratives over time” (Somers, 1994, p. 618); these include how people interpret and narrate social institutions and socio-political and cultural discourses (see Reading 3). Finally, conceptual narratives, reflect “the concepts and explanations that we construct as social researchers” (Somers, 1994, p. 620; see Reading 4).
Each of these three narrative types are, in turn, structured by what Somers refers to as “four dimensions of a reframed narrativity particularly relevant for the social sciences,” which are “1) relationality of parts, 2) causal emplotment, 3) selective appropriation, and 4) temporality, sequence, and place” (Somers, 1994, p. 616). Put differently, all narratives “are constellations of relationships (connected parts) embedded in time and space, constituted by… causal emplotment” (Somers, 1992, p. 601; emphasis in original). I take up these three types and four dimensions of narratives in my discussion of my remaking of the Listening Guide, briefly referring to a couple interview that I conducted with Tom (a stay-at-home dad for seven years and now a part-time health counselor) and Natasha (a pediatrician) in 2009, nine years after I first interviewed them.
Although there are many differences between the two versions of the Listening Guide, I highlight three overarching changes. First, the concepts that underpin the version of the Listening Guide that I used (and co-developed with Mauthner) over a decade ago—narrative, reflexivity, subjectivity—were all reconfigured to embrace several new epistemological and ontological concerns that arose through my shifting from representational to non-representational ways of knowing. Second, I experienced a shift in my understanding of what concepts are and how they work in data analysis processes. Previously I had thought about concepts only in the theoretical formulation of my project without attending to how they were performative in data analysis processes. In my second stage, I explored the histories, relationalities, and performativity of my informing concepts and I began to revision those concepts and the effects of these revisioning processes. I rethought, for example, the concept of the stay-at-home father (Doucet, 2016), binaries of work and care, and dominant conceptions of equality, and I developed wider conceptual narratives of care and breadwinning (Doucet, 2018a).
The third change was a shift in my thinking about what I was doing as a researcher. My research practices, guided by the voice-centered and representationalist assumptions that were built into the Listening Guide (Mauthner, 2017), had previously led me to believe I had collected and captured the stories of my research participants. I realized that I had been working with narratives through a “mode of representation” (Somers, 1994, p. 606; emphasis in original). Like many qualitative and narrative researchers, I referred to people’s stories as “their narratives,” as if those narratives were “already there,” removed from any intervention on my part to bring particular narratives into being. I came to the view that I was not collecting stories, but working with many “politics of possibilities.” I was, in fact, involved in the making of various types of multi-layered narratives with different dimensions that coalesced through my data analysis processes and my knowledge making and writing practices.
Here, my four reconfigured Listening Guide readings, and how I used them, are briefly laid out. Some of my points embrace the wider research process, but I focus mainly on the concerns of this book: the analysis of interview transcripts. As in my first phase of research, with the new Listening Guide, I conducted my own interviews and worked with hard copies of transcripts (using colored pencils for different readings). I also listened to the interview tapes while I did my readings. In the latter stages of analysis, I used ATLAS.ti mainly to trace concepts and conceptual narratives across all interviews and also to envision and write about new conceptual narratives using its memo-ing capacity. Finally, I developed case studies (from a few pages to approximately 20 pages). Drawing on Abbott (1992), I worked with case studies that highlight what he calls an “instance” (p. 53), which include a “case” or a “set of social objects” (p. 53; i.e., persons) or conceptual instances (i.e., concepts and conceptual narratives). In the second stage of the research project that informs this chapter, I used both of these types of case studies, developing case studies of couples/individuals as well as of key concepts and I worked parts of these case studies into written pieces (e.g., Doucet, 2018a). I built the case studies across time, working back and forth between the Listening Guide readings, ATLAS.ti memos, my fieldnotes, and both hard copy notes (in notebooks/research journals and on hard copies of transcripts) and typed notes (in Scrivener and Ulysses writing software).
To focus on emplotment is not to dispense completely with thinking about elements of plot, including plot themes (Frank, 1995). A narrative can exhibit qualities of both plot and emplotment, thereby justifying how a narrative can be both a noun and a verb, can be approached through both what and how questions, and always involves processes of “selective appropriation” for both the teller and the listener (Somers, 1994, p. 617; emphasis in original). This view supports the idea that there is nothing inherent or representational in a narrative plot; rather, researchers take responsibility for particular readings of plot, recognizing the choices made in the telling as well as in the listening.
In the first phase of my research, my data analysis processes attended to plot and to what people said, not to emplotment (i.e., how or why people said the things they did) or what processes of selection, contexts, and conditions of possibility framed their tellings. I did attend to how spoken narratives were situated in certain ideological and structural contexts and narratives, but I did not recognize how narratives—approached as matters of epistemology and ontology—are constituted by and within “relational and cultural matrices” (Somers, 1994, p. 662) that include “temporality, spatiality, and emplotment as well as relationality and historicity” (Somers, 1994, p. 620, emphasis in original). In practical terms, this meant that the interviews transcript readings were, in my first stage of research, pulled apart so that I read for narratives, then for the subject within those narratives. After this, I moved toward the wider relations of the subject and, finally, I wove my theoretical concerns into the fourth reading of my Listening Guide process.
I now approach the transcript readings in a much more integrated way. In practice, this shift has meant that across my interview transcripts, I still begin by attempting to trace the readings separately (especially when I want to focus on one narrative type or when I am curious about particular issues related to my research problematic or that arise from the interview phase). However, at some point in the process—beginning, middle, or end, depending on the interview—I also do simultaneous tracings of the four readings on my hard copy versions of the interview transcripts (Figure 6.2). This work of doing transcript readings is very time consuming, iterative, intuitive, and non-linear. Moving back and forth between readings, I recognize the integral relationality of the various kinds and dimensions of non-representational narratives, my narrative analysis, and my epistemic responsibilities as a researcher and writer.
Diffraction is about relationships, intervention, and “interacting within and as part of” (Barad, 2007, p. 89). As diffraction emphasizes intervening and is less about reading or listening, it is also connected to epistemic responsibility—not for what we “find,” but for what we both find and make—through our “matters of concern” (Latour, 2004, p. 231), “questions about care, concern, and advocacy” (Code, 2015, p. 1), and our conceptual narratives. In short, a shift from reflexivity to diffraction strengthens the attention to our epistemic practices. This is a move from “a place from which to know as the language of ‘perspectives’ might imply, indifferently available to anyone who chooses to stand there” to a view that our situatedness “is itself a place to know who intricacies have to be examined for how they shape both knowing subjects and the objects of knowledge” (Code, 2006, p. 40; emphasis in original).
Diffraction can mean many things in our research practices (Mauthner, 2017; Mazzei, 2014; Taguchi, 2012). For me, building on Haraway’s (1997) concept of diffraction, which is about “heterogeneous history, not about originals” (p. 273), it means recognizing ontological multiplicity in my analytic work (see Doucet, 2018c). Here, I not only attend to my reflexive responses to the interview transcripts but also consider how my concepts are performative in bringing forth particular narratives and excluding others.
Working with an ecological approach to narratives “redirects theoretical analyses toward situated knowledges, situated ethico-politics, where situation is constitutive of, not just the context for, the backdrop to, enactments of subjectivity… . This is not, then, a merely contextualized subjectivity” (Code, 2006, p. 19; emphasis in original). In my new approach, the ontological fit between narrative identities, nested narrative contexts, and conceptual narrativity is tighter.
What does this mean in practice? To shift from subjects to narrative identities means at least two things. First, it recognizes that identities (such as gender, class, race, sexuality, and ability) and categories (including the categories or concepts of “stay-at-home father” or “breadwinning mother”) are fleshed out and remade through intersecting narrative forms and dimensions. Somers (1992, 1994, 2008) argues that we should approach all analytic categories—and what she calls narrative identities—as narrated and unfolding in specific practices and relations (rather than as assumed categories). In terms of my narrative analysis process for the project that informs this chapter, this led me to scrutinize the taken-for-grantedness of concepts such as the stay-at-home father and to argue that they must be approached as contingent, contextual, highly heterogeneous, and shaped by intersectionality (Doucet, 2016).
Another point about this second reading is that this shift from subjectivity (as something to be found in the interview) to narrative identities (as being made within multi-layered narratives) leads to a different epistemological and ontological rationale for the Listening Guide’s “reading for the I” and writing of “I poems.” I still believe that this part of the Listening Guide is a valuable heuristic device, especially when intimate or difficult topics are being covered in life history interviews and/or where there is an urgent or political need to carefully listen to and center the first person perspective. The “I” reading can provide, for example, “sensitivity to detail, to minutiae, to what precisely—however apparently small—distinguishes this woman” from another (Code, 2006, p. 17; emphasis added). Its purpose now, however, is different. Unlike my earlier Listening Guide approach, which leaned toward attempting to capture subjectivities through “I poems,” my new approach attends to how narrative identities are produced in the telling of stories. This means paying attention to the dialogic quality of the interview, noting how the questions I ask and the problematics I am exploring may lead the teller to choose particular ways of speaking about themselves. I also attend more to how the teller emplots themselves, sometimes seeking to create positive enactments of their narratives and subjectivities.
My first stage of analysis, over a decade ago, identified some interview stories as “heroic narratives” (Doucet, 2006, p. 64), but neglected to deeply examine emplotment and narrative identities. My argument now addresses a broader sense of emplotment that exists in all interviews. Interview narratives are entanglements of plot and emplotment, constructed in particular ways for particular audiences and for particular purposes; they are entangled with the making and remaking of specific identities within particular contexts. In my second stage of research, these narrative identities related mainly to being a good/responsible mother/father and a good/responsible worker/breadwinner.
In this reading, I asked questions such as: What are these social, public, and cultural narratives? How did these constitute the stories people tell? As I analyzed my interview transcripts, I drew attention to how, implicitly or explicitly, specific policies (or lack thereof) affected mothering and fathering decisions, including childcare or parental leave policies. If people did not talk about these policies in their interviews, I drew attention to this gap in their parenting narratives as I recognized that connections between different narrative layers made particular stories possible. Tom and Natasha, for example, both took it for granted that their only option was for Tom to stay at home with their young children. This was because when their first child, Taylor, was born in 1993, only a short maternity leave was available for Natasha, a self-employed doctor, and daycare services were minimal. In their decision-making, Tom and Natasha thus drew on social, cultural, and public narratives about the need to have one parent at home. Taylor (16 years old at the time of their second interview) joined us for part of this second interview and, when asked about her future plans, she responded that she wanted to be a biologist and that she planned to use daycare. She added that she would expect neither herself nor her potential partner to be a stay-at-home parent. Her ontological narrative was thus different from her parents partly because the informing social, public, and cultural narratives had changed. For example, in her home province of Quebec, publicly funded, affordable daycare and generous parental leave provisions now existed for both mothers and fathers.
This reading frames the entire process of data analysis and knowledge making. Broadly speaking, I attend to how the concepts and conceptual narratives in my informing scholarly fields play a role in how I am framing my problematic, asking questions, and analyzing my interviews. I ask: Are there new conceptual narratives that I can revision or reimagine?
How has this new approach to reading for conceptual narratives in my data analysis process shifted my thinking and my arguments about concepts and conceptual narratives? Drawing again on the case study of Tom and Natasha, I began to question concepts of gender equality (Doucet, 2015), which led me to recognize how I was overlooking the severity of job precariousness for Tom and for other stay-at-home fathers. My earlier work had been informed by a specific concept of gender equality that focused on how women’s parental responsibilities impeded equality in paid work and care work. Utilizing a reconfigured concept of gender equality that attended more closely to class differences between caregiving situations and to issues of economic “vulnerability” (Fineman, 2008) for caregivers, my analysis shifted to also consider the workplace disadvantages faced by stay-at-home fathers, including Tom, who gave up paid work to be at home for several years.
With an awareness of how different conceptual narratives lead to different kinds of arguments and knowledges, in this fourth reading I also asked myself questions about my epistemic responsibilities. How and why was I emplotting the way I was? Why was I telling this scholarly narrative and not that scholarly narrative? How would I write this narrative? How and with whom would I negotiate my knowledge making? What are the possible effects of these narratives? How have my “matters of concern” (Latour, 2004, p. 231) my “questions about care, concern, and advocacy” (Code, 2015, p. 1) and my conceptual narratives played a role in bringing particular narratives into being? (Doucet, 2018a).
This chapter has laid out two phases of a research project on primary caregiving fathers and a reconfiguration of the Listening Guide into an ecological, ontological narrativity, and non-representational data and narrative analysis approach. A considerable difference in my reconfigured approach is that I now view my conceptual and theoretical concerns and my informing epistemological and ontological assumptions about narratives, knowledges, subjectivities, and social worlds as deeply entangled throughout the entire research process. In plain and provocative language, Arthur Frank in an interview with Eldershaw, Mayan, and Winkler (2007, p. 133; emphasis added) makes this point:
The crucial thing is that we need to get away from this rather crude epistemology of one person having the story inside of him- or herself and then delivering the story like the goose laying the egg in the presence of the other person, who then goes: What an egg! In fact, it’s a collaborative activity all the way through.
My reading of this collaborative activity is wide. I now read interview transcripts as a “relationality of parts” (Somers, 1994, p. 616) where people tell and emplot stories (ontological narratives) selectively, in particular conditions of possibility, including the public, social, and cultural narratives that constitute their lives and the stories they tell. These stories are constituted, in turn, within and through the conceptual narratives of researchers, who ask particular questions from among many “matters of concern” and then relay these stories as scholarly narratives within and to particular epistemic communities. I apply my new approach throughout my knowledge making process, not only in the analysis of transcripts, but in how I read authors (Doucet, 2018a), work with concepts, and understand my epistemic responsibilities. My interview transcript work is also guided by a few simple yet powerful questions: What makes that story possible?3 What narratives will I assemble? What scholarly narrative will I tell? Why am I telling that narrative?
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