writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

London for at least two years. In essence, there are three main components to this study: an
elicitation of visual representations of the everyday, combined with a semi structured interviewing
method, to conduct a narrative study.
Methodology
Visual methods
The main reason for using visual data along with verbal data for this study was the researcher’s
desire to go beyond the spoken word and the report about actions in favor of analyzing the actions
themselves as they naturally occur. Which aspects the subject chooses to include allows the
researcher to deduce statements about the views of the subjects towards their own everyday lives
(Flick, 2002). For this particular project, the participants were asked to take photographs of their lives
on a daily basis for two weeks, focusing on aspects of their everyday lives and routines. These
photographs were then analyzed using a systematic open and closed coding approach, as outlined by
Collier and Collier, and then discussed at the interview. First, an open viewing was conducted of all
the images repeatedly by the researcher until they become familiar. Second, a microanalysis
inventory was done of all the visual material in a structured and systematic process. Finally, a review
of all the material again brought the researcher full circle to the open viewing of the material (Collier
and Collier, 1986).
It is important to note that photography not only can show us what we have already found out,
but can also extend our visual processes and to help us find out more. Photographs can function as
points of discussion of the familiar or the unknown and their literal content can be read across
cultural boundaries (Collier and Collier, 1986), which is the main strength of utilizing this
methodology to explore the research question at hand. Images are used as bridges between worlds
that are more culturally distinct and people of different cultures spin out their respective worlds of
meaning (Harper, 2002). This idea of using visual images to cross the cultural bridge was important in
this study that recognizes the cultural and geographic differences that exist between the researcher
and the participants. The photo elicitation procedure is fueled by the radical but simple idea that two
people standing side by side, looking at identical objects, see different things; however when a photo
is made of that shared view, the differences in perception can be defined, compared and eventually
understood to be socially constructed by both parties (Harper, 2002). By using visual methods as part
of a storytelling approach combining voice and shared experiences, this study aims at addressing the
proposed research question in a novel manner, new to both the group studied and the researcher. It
is this collaborative social construction of meanings that this study hopes to achieve in the use of
visual representations of the everyday lives of Muslim women.
Narrative interviewing
Jovchelovitch and Bauer explain that the narrative interview envisages a setting that encourages
and stimulates an informant to tell a story about some significant event in their life and social
context (2010). Storytelling involves intentional states that alleviate, or at least make familiar, events
and feelings that confront ordinary everyday life (Jovchelovitch and Bauer, 2010). For this project,
after each participant took photographs for two weeks, their images were analyzed before the
interviews and four to six specific photographs (depending on the size of each case) were chosen as
reference points for the participant who was asked about the story behind each one, along with a
general discussion of the rest of the photographs. The chosen images were selected by the
researcher based on the topics that were similar across all cases to create an overlap in themes.
Thematic analysis, the method of analysis chosen for this methodology along with qualitative
case‐oriented open coding, is a stepwise qualitative text reduction: starting with the entire
transcription, it is then paraphrased by passage or paragraph into summary sentences, which are
then paraphrased into a few keywords. Categories are first developed for each narrative aspect of
each interview and later collated into a coherent overall category system for all the narrative aspects
in the project (Jovchelovitch and Bauer, 2010). This thematic focus enabled the researcher to identify
the common as well as the different topics and categories across all the interviews.
As the photographs and narrative interviews map onto each other in their themes, these two
methodologies are an appropriate fit for this study which attempts to understand how some Muslim
803