Thanks to all who stopped by my poster sessions at the NAFSA Conference or connected with me throughout the week. I am returning home feeling a renewed energy for my work and my research.
One takeaway from my conversations regarding my research with host mothers is the importance of storytelling – a) in the listening and gathering stories as a more culturally appropriate/comfortable “data collection method” than Likert scale response options and b) sharing stories as a way to make the “data” come to life. I conducted semi-structured interviews and questionnaires in the form of a pile-sort with 30 host mothers. My quantitative data paints a broad picture of women’s experiences hosting, while their individual stories prove rich examples of how hosting affects women's lives.
Yet, I feel hesitant to share individual stories here in this public forum. As I am currently in the writing stage of my thesis, I have to make lots of decisions about which stories to share and how much detail to provide about the women telling the stories. Using pseudonyms for the mothers and the town and following Institutional Review Board research protocol is not enough. I try to put myself in the place of each host mother, imagining what she would think of her story shared as written. I feel a deep obligation to share the voices of host mothers I interviewed, but only in the most respectful and responsible manner possible. As this takes a lot of thought and care, I will not launch into a moving story of how hosting positively transformed one women’s self-esteem and life of her family – but know that those stories exist and I will someday get to the point that I am ready to share.
One takeaway from my conversations regarding my research with host mothers is the importance of storytelling – a) in the listening and gathering stories as a more culturally appropriate/comfortable “data collection method” than Likert scale response options and b) sharing stories as a way to make the “data” come to life. I conducted semi-structured interviews and questionnaires in the form of a pile-sort with 30 host mothers. My quantitative data paints a broad picture of women’s experiences hosting, while their individual stories prove rich examples of how hosting affects women's lives.
Yet, I feel hesitant to share individual stories here in this public forum. As I am currently in the writing stage of my thesis, I have to make lots of decisions about which stories to share and how much detail to provide about the women telling the stories. Using pseudonyms for the mothers and the town and following Institutional Review Board research protocol is not enough. I try to put myself in the place of each host mother, imagining what she would think of her story shared as written. I feel a deep obligation to share the voices of host mothers I interviewed, but only in the most respectful and responsible manner possible. As this takes a lot of thought and care, I will not launch into a moving story of how hosting positively transformed one women’s self-esteem and life of her family – but know that those stories exist and I will someday get to the point that I am ready to share.