Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

eading and re-reading these interviews I came to the conclusion that this amount of data
offered sufficiently rich insights and reflections leading me to question the feasibility of
transcribing the remaining interviews. I assessed that eleven interviews offered a
significant challenge in terms of textual representation within the thesis, and that further
data would have become unmanageable.
2. Physical limitations. During the course of the thesis I was diagnosed with an upper limb
disorder treated by physiotherapy, acupuncture and steroid injections into the elbow.
Despite appropriate adaptations such as voice recognition software, I have an ongoing
hidden disability that limits the amount of time I can spend at a computer keyboard and
use of a mouse. This has a crucial impact on a qualitative research methodology, and
semi-structured interviews that utilizes large amounts of transcription and text.
3. Conceptual saturation. Qualitative research also uses the notion of ‘saturation’ to
describe the collecting of data until no new information is forthcoming, and which adds
little to that already established, whilst recognising in principle that every interview has
the potential to offer something unique. Charmaz’s critique is that it can be used to
justify ‘very small samples with thin data’ (Charmaz 2005: 528) and offers instead the
notion of ‘interpretative sufficiency’. While eleven interviews is a relatively small
number, it is a sample size adopted by other researchers (Jenkins 2006) and the data
generated met the requirements of Charmaz’s categories of credibility, originality,
resonance and usefulness as a basis for ‘interpretative sufficiency’ (Charmaz 2005:
527f.).
4. Cultural homogeneity of a research sample. An aim of this research was to locate
spirituality in contemporary psychoanalysis, which takes different forms in the UK,
Ireland and the USA. Having immersed myself in these differing cultural contexts, the
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