Traumatic States: Gendered Violence, Suffering, and Care in Chile

Appendix 1: Life History Interviews

169 A P P e n d i x 1 Life History Interviews The life history narrative was the primary form of data collection I employed to answer research questions. Life history narratives are crucial for gathering data about how women’s experiences of health and illness are related to social, political, economic, and cultural contexts and women’s particular situations within these contexts. These data, drawn from women with various situations and treatment outcomes, provide rich detail about women’s experiences of domestic violence and recovery. The life history interview, a form of unstructured interviewing (Bernard 1995), is an important way to understand how larger historical forces and political-economic structures affect people’s lives in specific ways (Mintz 1960) and women’s lives in particular (Behar and Gordon 1995; Personal Narratives Group 1989). Life history narratives are also used in therapeutic contexts in Chile for women who have suffered domestic violence (Padín 2001), illustrating its cultural congruence with the research population (Renzetti, Edleson, and Kennedy Bergen 2001). The life history interview is an especially important tool for research on women’s experiences, as women’s experiences are often absent in historical renderings and their voices are left unheard. With the life history interview, women’s experiences are brought to the forefront and can later be analyzed in terms of the historical contexts surrounding and informing them. Such an approach is important in reconstructing the past through individuals’ narratives, especially narratives by those disenfranchised by dominant regimes, power structures, and institutions. For women who suffered domestic violence, whose possibilities to exert their wills are co-opted within their most intimate 170 Traumatic States spheres and by structural violence embedded in the justice system, it is indispensable. The life history interview is also a relatively noninvasive way to investigate very sensitive and personal experiences. In my research I viewed the life history interview as a process in which building trust with the interviewee was of paramount importance. During the first interview with each woman, I invited her to tell me about her life, starting with whatever aspect of her life she wished to share first. Some women wanted a more specific question, to which I responded by asking questions such as “Where did you grow up?” and then using noninvasive follow-up questions to ease them into the process. The idea behind beginning the interview process in this way was that each woman would feel as comfortable as possible in narrating her experience . It is important in such research (as with research on torture by the state, for example) that the interviewee be adequately supported in the information collection process, that she be potentially able to use the interview as an opportunity to assign meaning to her life and its events, and that every effort is made to have the experience be empowering . In other words, it is essential to avoid making the experience one in which the victim is revictimized; instead, the researcher’s goal should be to do the opposite. These of course are ideals and do not always come to fruition, but it is ethically imperative that the researcher be consciously aware of these goals and respect the human rights of the interviewee in every way possible. I used this method of data collection because it provided data related to the contexts of women’s experiences of domestic violence, help-seeking, and recovery from their points of view. The goal was to understand how each woman framed her life experiences in general and these life experiences in particular. In this way it was possible to investigate the meanings women assigned to life events and to solicit information noninvasively about their feelings and emotions related to domestic violence, as well as the complicated contexts of these experiences. The interview process for each woman depended on her own style of relating her life history and her level of engagement with the interview . I attempted to gauge, based on each woman’s reactions and re- Appendix 1 171 sponses, when it would be appropriate to ask more specific questions designed to provide data about particular research concerns. I attempted to elicit from each informant two “histories.” First, I sought each woman’s general life history and the political, historical, and personal contexts surrounding her experiences of domestic violence and recovery. Second, I tried to elicit her illness history, a medical anthropological method (Kleinman 1988) that includes her...