WORKING AS A COORDINATOR MIDWIFE IN A TERTIARY ...

space, things, the body and others” which constitute the nature of lived experience (p.32).
Discovery of appearances and the “essence” of experiences took time and required
intimacy with the content of the material. I needed to listen to the tapes, the nuances, the
tones of voice, the humour and the frustrations. Repeatedly, I was listening, reading and
writing. I became inseparably part of the process as I worked towards reliability of my
interpretation. What was said and how I interpreted transcripts was not ‘Dasein’ unless I
followed van Manen’s methodology and discovered what was revealed. This revelation
took a longer period of time than I had anticipated with a number of themes eventually
identified and consistent between stories. I learnt that I could not rush this process and
rather like Heidegger’s notion of time, clocks, watches, calendars and diaries needed to
be discarded before I recognized I felt free enough to really explore the concealed content
of the ‘Dasein’ of the phenomenon I was peeling back.
Interviews were initially transcribed, crafted into stories (Caelli, 2001) and then
participants approved the content which became the canvas from which to work. By
listening to and reading transcripts word by word, sentence by sentence, meaning
revealed itself and writing flowed. Over the course of the interpretive time, thoughtful
reflection required that I wrote and rewrote. It took many months to discover the
elusiveness of the phenomenon. Van Manen (1990) refers to “the art of writing and
rewriting” as an essential component of “bringing to speech”, the phenomenon being
revealed (p.32).
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