A Father’s Love: Towards a Normal Family

Abstract

Towards the end of the interview I asked my informants to tell me a story from their lives that involved their children. The rationale behind this was methodological: I wanted my informants to take over the agenda of the interview. Every question, however much it is designed to elicit a free narrative, results from my ‘interest’ (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). Giving my informants the opportunity to ‘tell me a story’, I hoped to give up my perspective on the construction of the interview completely. I wanted to position them as people with a story of themselves and their children so that they could set out to provide a narrative which ‘made them intelligible’ (Gergen and Gergen, 1988) within their particular social context. I assumed, following Harré and van Langenhove (1999) that they would present me with a number of past events and/or episodes which crucially contributed to who they are and what kind of fathers they are. I was interested in their own relevancies in the stories of their children.