Listening Guide

The Structure of the Listening Guide

The Listening Guide is a polyphonic analytic methodology in that it seeks to pick up the many voices in which people speak of their lived experience. Its theory and practice are shaped by interdisciplinary theories stemming from the fields of psychology, literary analysis and music. In order to render such a complex understanding of a given narrative, the Listening Guide requires at least four separate listenings. The first listening, sometimes referred to as the ‘plot’ listening, asks the listener to construct a landscape of the interview. What stories are told? What are the major landmarks of the narrative (e.g. repeated phrases, words, contradictions, etc.)? What are the major themes? What are the silences, the stories left untold? In listening for the silences, the researcher becomes a ‘resisting’ listener, drawn from Judith Fetterley's notion of the ‘resisting reader’. The first listening also requires a ‘listener's response’ drawn from the notion of reader response theory. During this listening, the researcher attends to her own emotions, associations, reactions, questions and confusions. In this way, she can be sure to be alert to the issues that she brings to the analytic process and make every effort not to project her own voice onto that of the participant.

The second listening, sometimes referred to as the ‘listening for self’ is the core of this methodology. In this phase, the researcher is tuning in closely to the way the participants ‘speak of themselves'. The researcher must remain conscious of the fact that since it is a relational process, participants speak of themselves in relationship to the researcher in response to the questions asked and influenced by the place and time of the interview. In other words, this is a humble stance of listening for a self-in-relation. In order to hear the aspects of self that the participant shares in the interview, the researcher extracts ‘I phrases' (the word ‘I’ plus the immediate following verb, e.g. ‘I want’, ‘I need’, ‘I think’, ‘I know’, ‘I don't know’, etc.) in strict order as these phrases appear in the text. This ‘I’ is one representation of the participant's self-in-relation, one [Page 511]expression of how the participant expresses her lived experience. In extracting these phrases, Debold discovered that they fall in line poetically, forming what is often called the ‘I poem’, a way to listen for the ways the ‘I’ speaks. This ‘I voice’ is often in dialogue with other internal voices—sometimes a more removed ‘you’ voice, a collective ‘we’ voice or a distant ‘she’ or ‘he’ voice. When listening to the dialogue between these voices, the researcher can hear the internal dialogues that are often articulated as people reflect on the relational contexts of their lives. In describing the second listening, Gilligan often recounts that it is a way of magnifying the participants' voices or of making their voices more ‘magnificent’. By drawing out the ‘I voice’, the researcher can temporarily quieten the surrounding voices, narratives and competing stories to hear the desires, confusions, questions and needs of the participants.

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