narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

Bengal. The distinctiveness of Bengali adda will be discussed in the first chapter of
analysis). At every step of the interview, analysis of text and the final written narrative of
the research, participants were ensured full anonymity and confidentiality as part of an
ethical consideration. Participants’ names have thus been changed in the research.
Almost every interview went for as long as five hours. In many cases, there were
multiple sittings with a gap of one and a half years between the sittings, occurring during
my first (January 2010 – October 2010) and second (June 2011 – September 2011) visit
to the field.
To compensate for the difficulties that arose from sharing friendship or kinship with my
subjects, I consciously selected a few participants with whom I had no previous contact.
Forty percent of the interviewees from the ordinary field were reached through a
process of ‘snowball’ sampling with a faith in the referent’s conjecture or conviction that
the recommended subject could be ‘relevant’ for my research in terms of his or her
openness to issues of intimacy and through the stories s/he could possibly bring into
this research. It took time to start off conversation and dialogue with them and develop
an immediate rapport within the time of the interview but this non-intimate relation often
ironically made it easier to discuss intimate issues owing to minimal immediate
accountability of friendship and the burden of ‘keeping face’.
Subjects’ class identities were discerned not through objective criteria of income or
economy but by subjects’ self definition, that most often mapped onto indicators of
middleclass culture and world views. These were in turn indicated by subjects’ claim to
education, conventional middleclass professions and lifestyle choices, middleclass
status, a general desire for upward mobility through knowledge and consumption and
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