Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Firstly, some of the interviews were conducted before I had completed the critical and
conceptual understandings developed in part B. Consequently they could have taken a
different form, yet entering into complex areas as a ‘naive’ participant allows, as Ricoeur
argues, a different form of knowledge or understanding. The reality was that I had become
so bogged down in material that a colleague suggested that I just do the interviews, an act
that re-energized both the research process and me.
Secondly, in using a thematic analysis what gets missed? The limitation of an interview
transcript is that it can only verify what took place when the ‘record’ button was pressed.
While recorded interviews pick up information that the interviewer’s memory would not
have recalled or filtered out, it never fully captures the whole experience (Kvale 2007). I
experienced this in meeting JB, where some words spoken after the interview as we were
descending in a lift, had an important personal impact on me and spoke of a real encounter
between us. They were not recorded. A secondary issue was the vast number of themes
that could have been added to those highlighted in the thematic analysis and is a
consequence of eleven interviews running to 123,000 words of potential data. In addition
the qualitative research day with discussion of two interview transcripts was recorded and
transcribed, leading to a further 20,000 words, marginal reflexive comments written on the
interview texts and additional written submission in response to my questions. Some of this
rich data is found in appendix six.
Thirdly, a specific tension related to the form of the interview transcripts for both the
interviewer and the interviewee. Does a verbatim transcript mean every literal word, pause,
breath, laugh, creak, sound, and the multiple phrases we use while thinking ah, oh uhm,
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