Hermeneutics of Self as a Research Approach

The quest

The quest under investigation was to gain insights from my (Kenneth's) experience of undertaking an exploratory 3-week field visit to HIV programs in Malawi. Hermeneutic philosophy, drawing particularly on Heidegger (1962/1995) and Gadamer (1982), was used as a guide to thinking. Understanding comes from the experience of being-there, which is then gathered together as events, feelings, and memories, into language. Making a visit to a different culture, going specifically to try to understand the impact of HIV on the lives of the poor, and considering the benefits and dangers of bringing my young children to live in Malawi meant I took with me a particular interpretive lens. I saw things through my New Zealand eyes of being a sheep-shearing nurse, husband, and father who by the grace of God wants to help the world to be better place. Yet as well as bringing who I already was, I was projecting ahead to who I might become, imagining how it would be for me and my family to immerse ourselves in this culture. On any one day I had a huge range of experiences. I saw things, had many conversations, experienced a wide range of emotions, felt the impact of the environment on my body, and watched my wife having her own experience. I was open to some things and barely noticed others. I was shocked, grieved, delighted, and inspired. It was an overwhelming experience, too full to unpack in response to the question one gets on return: “How was it?” Such inquirers only wanted a 5-minute answer.

In a hermeneutic approach the researcher recognizes that truth lies hidden, revealing itself as appearances, or things that announce insights. Further, our interpretation of what seems to be might not be how it is at all (Heidegger, 1962/1995). The gaze is directed “towards the regions where meaning originates, wells up, percolates through the porous membranes of past sedimentations –and then infused us, permeates us, infects us, touches us, stirs us, exercises a formative effect” (van Manen, 2007, p. 11). There is no one “saying” that can capture all that is understood. Words themselves limit and distort complex meaning (Gadamer, 1982). The way to understanding is through a kind of thinking Heidegger describes as “meditative”:

The seeds that underpin this study were planted with my first thoughts of wanting to work in Malawi. The coming up and ripening emerged through the ongoing experience of going there and thinking about how that was. Questions were central to my thinking. Heidegger (1987) talks of questioning, which draws us into the open and casts “a new space over everything and into everything” (p. 30). Further, “questions do not just occur like stones and water. Questions are not found ready-made like shoes and clothes and books” (p. 19). I eagerly took on Elizabeth's suggestion that I bring the questions of others to provoke ongoing thinking of my experience in Malawi. I also wanted my questioners not to come with a list of readymade questions but, rather, join me in a conversation. Gadamer (1982) described how we “fall” into conversation and how each takes “its own turning” (p. 345) and reaches its own conclusion. The conversation itself lead the way, beyond any prethinking or expectations of either party. The idea that people from a variety of backgrounds would come and join with me in conversation, bringing both informed questions from their areas of expertise, and naïve questions from knowing little about certain aspects of my visit seemed to us to be a way to provoke meditative thinking.

More than self

Although a hermeneutic of self takes self as the giver of data, such a study will always also be about other. Thielicke (1982) brings the understanding that we find identity from the interactions of those around us. It is only when one interacts with difference and diversity (the “other”) that one finds one's true self. This challenges any individualistic model of life. During the course of study I was constantly wrestling with the question of: “Is it all about me?” The study itself was an unfolding event, the more it was about me the more it was about others. For that is how relationship is held together. Ackermann (1998) illustrates the fluidity connecting the self and the other as follows:

Here Ackermann is challenging a human's completeness without being in relationship with others, yet in the relationship-mirror both parties need to be seen equally. A hermeneutic of self provides a platform of critical discovery through the deep reflections drawn from looking out of oneself into this mirror. The view contains both a transparent view of self and the impact of being in relationship with others.

The question is: How can one be both the researcher and that which is being researched? Koch (1999) highlights that although we at times seek an objective position at other times we are called to a phenomenological approach where “both researcher and participant become subjectively aware of the essence … We are the same coin” (p. 24).

Authenticity

My challenge was how to be authentic to myself in the process of being a visitor in another culture, being self among others. Reflecting on Heidegger's work related to authenticity Crowe (2006) writes:

I discovered a hermeneutics of self takes on the challenge of owning up to oneself with profound honesty. Van Manen (2007) reminds us such an approach is likely to make life more difficult rather than offer any easy answers. Placing oneself as the person on whom the transcripts of the research focus, analyzing “self” with one's own questions and thinking and then presenting this for public critique, is to expose one's behaviors, ideas, values, and moods that in the normal everyday would remain mainly hidden. It is to accept the critique of self upon self and from that be willing to change. It is in no way an easier approach but, nevertheless, personally enriching. I also believe that the profound honesty that emerged in the analysis speaks beyond self to the human experience of being a global coworker. Although my particular experience was unique, underlying that is a human experience likely to be known by others. They, too, will remember or encounter excitement, confusion, vulnerability, paradox, guilt, dread, hope, and love. Such is the nature of stepping out into unknown places, people, issues, and culture.

The plan

The first stage data collection began prior to my 3-week trip to Malawi with a preunderstandings interview with Elizabeth, my supervisor. This helped me articulate assumptions that would color my interpretations. While I was away, I collected my own self-reflective data at the end of each day (second-stage data). On my return the third-stage data collection, where others interviewed me, was commenced. This included a further interview with my supervisor. Ethics approval was gained (from the Auckland University Ethics Committee) for me to be interviewed by up to 10 people. Although it could be argued the data were mine, I was also mindful that the interviewers needed to be informed of the purpose of their involvement and to have the right to delete any comments that reflected back on them. They thus received information sheets and signed a consent form. The ethical considerations also addressed the possibility (which did not arise) that I, or any of my interviewers, could be prompted into serious emotional vulnerability by the conversations. Arrangements were made for counseling if this situation arose. The nature of these three stages of data collection is described below, followed by a description of the process of analysis.

Preunderstandings (first-stage data)

Van Manen (1990) explains the hermeneutic call for the researcher to be mindful of the prejudices (Gadamer, 1982) they bring to the research process. As supervisor Elizabeth interviewed me about the preunderstandings and expectations I already had in my thinking. I had traveled through Malawi with my wife several years earlier. I am a nurse and thus already had thoughts on the experience of HIV and AIDS. I had just completed a theology degree and was wrestling with big questions about why the church seemed to be doing so little around this issue. The dream of taking my wife and two young daughters to a country such as Malawi to be involved in some sort of development work excited me, yet I also appreciated the tensions of such a move. This strong horizon of understanding (merely pointed to in this paragraph) was already in my thinking. The interview was tape-recorded and transcribed, and later became part of the data pool. I referred to each transcript as a whole text (Lindseth & Norberg, 2004). Yet always I was aware of all that had stayed unspoken and unthought at that interview. One cannot capture the shaping of one's life in an hour. That quest was to continue throughout the following phases.

In the field (second-stage data)

My wife and I had already arranged this visit to Malawi prior to the research component being formalized. Now we needed to inform the people we were visiting that my insights were going to be part of a reflective research process. There were times when I was mindful that people were perhaps more hesitant with me than they might otherwise have been. Even though I did not include any information in my study that could have identified people, still my stories were about situations in which they were a part. But then most hermeneutic research data are about situations. The difference is that people do not know in advance that a story about a particular event might become part of a research study.

Koch (1998) described how the process of observing and listening feeds into the controlling question of “What is it like … ?”(p. 1888). The question of “What is it like?” was a key part of my daily experience as I informally engaged with the aspects of life of a westerner being in Malawi. This informal engagement consisted of exposure to rural and urban clinics, Hope for AIDS programs, missionary nurses, church-based programs, home-based care, family homes of missionaries working in Malawi, and local government health care strategies. The field exposure was facilitated through the field coordinator of a missionary organization in Malawi. This had an advantage of using the time available in Malawi to the fullest, as most of the formal interactions were planned and people were willing to give their time. However, this also had the influencing effect of people assuming my goals and giving me a particular kind of experience.

During this field time I was active in what Smythe, Ironside, Sims, Swenson, and Spence (2008) have called “the phenomenological conversation” when “each conversation is uniquely itself” (p. 4). I engaged with the local Malawians and then at the end of each day audio-recorded my reflections, later transcribing them into my laptop. These were the second-stage research data, which took the form of daily self-reflexive stories and reflections of the day. I faced (personal) challenges, the depth of which could be reached only by my being immersed in HIV programs and life in Malawi. The question of “What is it like?” was kept real as one purpose of this experience was to discover what my future could be. As I looked at the effects/changes made by westerners (positive and negative), I asked: Would I be any different? There was hope that I could become as impressive and fear that I, too, might disappoint. This visit left me with memories captured in photographs, my journal, stories that would come back to my mind, and emotions that lingered behind them.

On return (third-phase data)

The first interview on my return was again conducted by Elizabeth, my supervisor, allowing the conversation to follow on from our earlier discussion of my expectations. Some things were the same, others very different. The experience made explicit excitement, fear, tensions and recognition of the complex hugeness of taking on such a commitment. The challenge was to capture some of the understandings born of this experience in a manner that took me beyond my already-there thinking. That was the key reason to invite “others” to interview, hoping that they would ask questions I had never thought about, probe me in areas I might have preferred to avoid, encourage me to tell more when I thought I had told enough, and show me by their own response of listening a glimpse of myself.

The thinking

From all of these interview experiences I accumulated 13 texts to work with in shaping my analysis which continued to grow throughout this talking-writing-reflecting-reading process. Although conceptually one talks of working with the data as if it is a step-by-step linear process, it is more like an event. Heidegger (1962/1995) used one of his more simple terms to describe this event. He calls it “thinking” (Heidegger, 1969). I was challenged by a quote from Gadamer (1994) where he described his student experience of learning from Heidegger what thinking means. He recalled how “the boldness and radicality of the questions … would take one's breath completely away” (pp. 62–65) and remembered the passion of the experience.

My thinking would be triggered as a new interview would pick up on the “passion” of the topic I was wrestling with (at-that-present-moment). In each conversation new questions opened my thinking, at times creating what Heidegger would call a “moment of vision” (Inwood, 1997, p. 82). This “glance” of understanding, the “I get it,” is something Heidegger worked with by reflecting on the dramatic change in the lives of St. Augustine, St. Paul, and Martin Luther (Inwood, 1997). This tells of “a point” where everything looks different. In contrast, the three-dimensional process of working with the transcripts, being interviewed afresh, and thinking was more a journey within which there were points of significance. As new understandings were revealed from these three angles, there was also the tension of what Harman (2007) called the “perpetual war between light and shadow” (p. 153), how in the uncovering there is always concealment, as aletheia (truth) is only ever partially revealed. Once all the interviews were complete and transcribed the thinking and passion continued. As I re-read the transcripts I spent time Thinking Hermeneutically and Reflecting through the Experience, Asking questions while Dwelling in the everyday (THREAD) (Figure 1). The following is a diagrammatic description of my methodology. It shows the all important movement of life, which is never singular in direction. The hermeneutic of self discovery takes place within a movement (THREAD) and this movement (THREAD) breaks the false duality between work and self when one embarks on working cross-culturally.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Capturing the process

Writing

Van Manen (2006) stated, “One does not write primarily for being understood; one writes for having understood being” (p. 721), and, further, that writing is “the method” (van Manen, 1990, p. 126). It is the writing process that “separates us from what we know and yet it unites us more closely with what we know” (p. 127). Writing is the forum for “re-thinking, re-flecting, recognizing” (p. 131). In this sense, “Interpretive thinking is a proceeding rather than a procedure” (Diekelmann, 2005, p. 5). Working with the THREADs was again rereading transcripts while making notes and drawing diagrams and mind maps expressing the gathering of ideas illuminated in the “unfolding” of the THREAD. The THREAD created, even demanded to work with others because as I dwell in the everyday, life itself joins the hermeneutic. I would write, leave the writing, let the thinking continue on, reread what I had written, see it afresh, and write again, and again.

Moving from THREADs to themes

Three themes surfaced: Going to and from the call looked at what gathers as one examines the journey of understanding the desire to work cross-culturally. I came to see the nature of the call on my life to care for other, prodding me to become a global coworker. From this come questions to the reader about the call on their own life. The second theme, Doing in-between: the spiraling movement of care, wrestled with what one does and how one does it within the context of working cross-culturally. I identified the importance of first gaining the acceptance and trust of those one seeks to work with, for “to maintain long term change, it is the people who need to be centred, not the problem” (Fleck, 2008, p.131), and “Authors of change need to draw horizons together, creating freedom for the doing to continue without them” (p. 131). This offers a challenge to the reader related to their way of working with others toward achieving change. The third theme, Being-there: being their, showed the internal tensions of how to be authentic to oneself, one's family, and one's faith amid difference. I concluded this chapter saying, “It is peering into my inner core. If the experience of the trip to Malawi is surface walking then this is open cast mining” (p. 155). I came to see how important it is to first spend time coming to know self before offering oneself as a global coworker. The message is that any person at the threshold of such work needs to find a way of going through some sort of pilgrimage of recognizing how self affects and is affected by others.

Although each theme was complete in itself, the guiding themes were so interrelated they created a whole and showed the tensions in the going-doing-being paradigm. No one story was ever about just one thing. Everything wove together. I would focus on one thread only to realize that it needed to be rewoven into the fabric of the whole to show itself amid the complex tensions. I lived in the tension of “what I was working on right now” and the pull back to the all-consuming whole, not just of this particular research project but the question of the future calling for me and my family into such work. It was a creative process yet demanded a product that captured my search for the ontological meaning within working with HIV epidemic cross-culturally. My experience of presenting insights from this research in face-to-face settings is that it engages others with thoughts of their own cross-cultural experiences. They, too, return to self to see how their interactions with others have affected and could affect others.

Trustworthiness

Koch (1996) has recommended that “each inquiry determine its own criteria for rigor (trustworthiness)” (p. 174). A key to trustworthiness is openness. Interpretive texts in this study come in three forms: personal (journal notes and daily reflections), collective (interview transcripts), and literature. These forms of language require the same treatment of interpretation acknowledging that it is not possible to bracket the researcher out of the hermeneutic circle. For the hermeneutic circle to show rigor, there needs to be clear acknowledgement of whose voice is being heard, not only for representation of the voice but to show how the fusion of horizons is happening. The space is created for meaning to be formed if the readers can allow themselves to become both readers and authors simultaneously, in the sense of a vessel of ideas rather than an owner. The reader then understands differently and maybe with new clarity, yet as Vanhoozer (2007) has suggested, this clarity is still “provisional,” providing “partial glimpses” so the interpretive reader remains in what Gadamer (1989) termed “the play.” This method invited the reader to explore for themselves where the clarity can be and where there needs to be a deeper look at one's own horizon.

This openness is an even greater challenge in a hermeneutics of self approach, for one's assumptions and prejudices are so embedded as to be part of the taken-for-granted lens by which one interprets. I recognize the layer upon layer of revealing that lies at the heart of a hermeneutics of self. I wrestle with the moral and the political issues of cross-cultural HIV and AIDS work for to ignore them, because of political correctness, would reduce the trustworthiness. I invite readers to recognize that they, too, have their own view, their own beliefs, their own life experience. It takes a long, intense look in a mirror for me and for you, as I describe in my thesis:

Personal transformation that happened through this hermeneutic of self has been profound, equipping, and informing. In the next section I give glimpses of how the reflective thinking revealed insights layer by layer.

How do you know you should go?

I reflected deeply about my call to cross-cultural work. This research offered me the opportunity to test the authenticity of the call by tasting the experience, reflecting on the experience and opening oneself to the questions of others. These strategies are available to others outside of a research paradigm. Such rigorous testing proves a call as likely to be resilient amidst the hard challenges bound to lie ahead.

How are you going to make a difference?

I learned that if I was to make a difference I first needed to learn to listen to others, to build their trust, and to believe in their potential. I came to see that such engagement was an act of love. Others need to find their own answer to this question.

Who are you going to be?

I came to see I needed to offer myself as servant, as one who would seek to understand, to learn, to build trust, to accept and to be open. A person embarking on cross-cultural work needs to consider the vulnerability of such a mode of being-with, of being-their: their friend, their partner, their servant.

What will sustain you in your involvement?

This research enabled me to see that we need to first live realistically within our human capacity, unobstructed by our wrong thinking of who we are or what we should or can achieve. However, we also need support such as webs of nurturing relationships, regular breaks away, and a deeply held sense of Sabbath, which makes a time of reflective rest a normal pattern of living. Thinking, questioning, and coming to understand afresh needs to be an ongoing discipline toward responsive and responsible sustainability. A person going into cross-cultural work for the first time needs to address these vital issues of sustainability from the outset.

When cross-cultural workers work through such questions in relationship to who they are and who/where they are going to serve, then the people from the other culture, such as the people of Malawi, will surely benefit from a relationship that is more open, more respectful, more responsive, and less distorted by misunderstandings. Further, the relationship is likely to be more enduring.