Some valuable feedback about the research/analysis methods of this blog have been arrived from one of our readers. Although our posts are casual writings taking an article format, I decided to share some parts of our email conversation to clear up my readers' doubts.
Q: "I really appreciate you sharing something so private with me. I feel like I saw another side of you, vulnerable and a real human being, more than just the blog posts I saw online. Maybe you need to show this side to your other readers too. Not the private stories, just something more about how the experiences made you feel and the realization of him acting like he cared and wanted to be friends was just an act of trying to maintain a casual sexual relationship." (Mar 23, 2017)
"Sorry about the misunderstanding. I do think you are offering a lot of private information already. I guess what I meant was for you to share with us more about how the events made you feel." (Mar 30, 2017)
A: What you said is related to the method I chose to describe, that is "complete participant observation", Normally it should describe how the researcher felt in the interaction with the subject also, like you said.
However, this method has an inherent limitation of qualitative investigation, to get objectivity. Also, I've already received some typical criticism of the narcissist's flying monkeys such as "This is just one-side story. There is another side of the story always.", even though I've not gotten any data from "the other side" yet.
Since the purpose of this blog is to let the people know the information and hopefully convince them to escape from the narcissistic relationship, not to get a methodological accuracy, I doubt if describing more the researcher's perspective would help to achieve our goal.
Q: "In addition to the objectivity and to be more convincing, maybe it's better if you separate the extra data obtained from your eight interviews individually, instead of mixing them together? And the order is a little bit off, according to the timeline. Maybe you can fix it up and organize it in chronological order so it's easier to understand?" (Mar 30, 2017)
A: There is a limitation to write the collected interview data because of the interviewees' privacy. That's why I chose to add them on the original narrative analysis. As a member checking of the collected data in the participant observation, it would be great if I could write them chronologically and specifically, to get more objectivity in academical perspective. But the interviewees wanted to keep their identity in secret. So, the most important thing for me is keeping the promise even though I'm using ambiguous descriptive words on the post.
There is a dilemma as always. I was also considering changing the organizing method because this article format is not easy to understand. I am fully aware that it is not completely organized yet. I will reorganize the posts soon when I have time to do it.
P.S. Also, one of my friends, who is in European History field, strongly criticized about the used lying detection theory for the analysis because it has a functionalist perspective and also took a skeptical stance toward the psychoanalytic approach. I value his view, however, the principal method of our post is a complete participant observation, that is a constructivist data collection method, and the post-observation with the obtained data from the interviews as a casual way of cross-checking provides the extra support for the original writing and helps to reduce the intervention caused by the researcher's perception during the analysis.
April 2017
P.S.2. I received another criticism from the same friend that points out "the objectivity" of the observation, since the researcher failed to have a proper emotional distance from the subject in the original observational period and chose the method of interviewing the people involved without direct observation on the subject's reaction in the post-observational period due to losing the rapport with him. However, we can't deny the selected strategy was effective to collect the information to increase the level of objectivity and helped to achieve our goal at a certain level.
July 2017
