I Poems and Polyvocality: Experiences of Using a Combined Qualitative Creative Analysis Technique to Strengthen the Voices of Research Participants and Aid Reflexivity

Abstract

We are colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire who studied together in the same cohort for our Doctorates in Education. Whilst we conducted studies in quite different areas, and used different primary data analysis techniques, we both independently decided to incorporate an additional phase of data analysis using techniques drawn from feminist ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan’s Listening Guide (1993) to construct I poems to strengthen the voices of the people who took part in our research. We have since used this combined approach in several other projects and feel that it has enhanced our approach to data analysis.
In this chapter we present our experiences of taking ownership of our research and allowing ourselves to be creative through use of this combined qualitative data analysis approach. We will provide examples of the procedure to illustrate our creative analytic process as we constructed I poems to balance the presentation of the collective experience via a thematic approach, with a preservation of individual experiences. We believe that combining different data analysis approaches can complement each other and provide additional dimensions to analysis and findings. We will also demonstrate how the use of I poems can deepen researcher reflexivity.