Data Collection

For conducting this research, I traveled to Iran and interviewed women activists who have been active in the women’s movement in Iran. I worked on the hypothesis that an interview in social studies is not just a window on social reality; it is a sample of reality (Czarniawska-Joerges 2004:

52). To access these samples of the realities and understanding the context from the perspective of women who have been living and acting as independent women rights activists in Iran after the Islamic revolution, I decided to gather some primary data. The possibility of collecting these testimonies through face to face interviews from inside the country is rare. Most of the researches in this field are done by women activists who have been in exile for years after the Islamic revolution and do their research from long physical distance.

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This research is based on nine in-depth and open-ended interviews completed during January, February and June 2018 in Iran. All the interviewees are living in the capital city of Tehran except one, who lives in the city of Mashhad. These women range in age from 28 to 93 years and come from different parts of society with different religious and political backgrounds. All the respondents have university degrees and had work experiences in various fields such as a schoolteacher, a Quranic teacher, a member of the parliament, a journalist, a university teacher, an entrepreneur, and a specialist doctor. All the women in this research have a connection to women's NGOs as founders or active members. While I did not ask them to introduce themselves separately, they referred to their qualifications and careers in the course of our conversation.

Accessing special people and interviewing them in Iran need some prior connections; you must be known to friends of friends, or friends of the family, and only then you would be allowed admittance. I tried to use my journalistic connections and some familiar names to let the interviewees trust me. I recorded all the interviews except one of them and transcribed approximately 30 hours of recorded narrations (see Appendix B). I conducted interviews in Persian.

When I had completed my interviews and returned to Finland, I began to transcribe the interviews myself. Since this research depends on my participants’ narratives, I decided to use their quotes as much as the capacity of this thesis would let me. I have tried to let my interviewees speak for themselves. The translation process was a difficult phase for me because transferring the meanings and feelings from one language to another is not easy when words carry different emotions, although they have the same meanings. First, I decided to translate the parts of these narrations according to their relevance to my specific research question. Soon I realized that I cannot do that as they all try to shed light and conceptualize the ongoing women’s movement in Iran from various approaches. For this reason, I just dropped some repetitions and similar notions that different activists narrated and excluded some specific thoughts that have less relevance to the research in this phase.

3.2. Interviews

In peace and conflict research, scholars try to transfer the voices of micro-levels, especially by narrative turns (Mac Ginty & Firchow 2016: 309). A narrative interview is an influential tool for recollecting the personal experiences (Scheibelhofer 2008: 405). As Maynes, Pierce, and Laslett argue, personal narratives-autobiographies, oral histories, life history interviews, and memoirs are essential research tools for understanding the relationship between people and their societies

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(Gansel & Vanderbeke 2012: 182). As Brouneus (2011: 130) puts it, by doing an in-depth interview, the researcher becomes an active listener and tries to lead conversations in an extended discussion. In peace studies using in-depth interviews is more common for understanding the challenges, possibilities, and risks of peace at grassroots levels According to Alasdair Mac Intyre (1981- 1990), social life is a narrative; indeed, narratives are useful tools that they can open a path to the most typical form of social life (Czarniawska-Joerges 2004: 15).

Narratives are the central mechanisms for meaning-making for people and they can open a window into human interactions (Riessman & Quinney 2005: 392). Narratives can provide insight into the variety of lived experiences by unfolding the meaning experienced by society's members (Bamberg 2012: 3). According to Ochs et al. (1996), narratives consist of components that include setting, internal response, consequence, and reactions. It is very crucial that by narrations, respondents try to construct an identity for themselves (Stewart & Maxwell 2010: 37). In this respect, while I was conducting in-depth interviews, I recognized that all my respondents preferred to narrate their long-term experiences in the women’s movement. I explained the subject of my research when I called them up to arrange the time for our meetings, and then in the meetings, they told their stories in their narrative styles.

An explanatory note seems appropriate here. In some of these interviews, my method was a combination. In the first phase of the interview, I asked open-ended questions. Then in the second phase, I asked some limited semi-structured questions that allowed for a focused dialogue. This combined method, which is called a problem-centered interview, is methodologically interesting.

This method gives freedom to the interviewee to structure the narration at the beginning according to the relevant settings. Then the researcher can set up specific questions that are especially relevant for the research focus at the later stages of the interview (Scheibelhofer 2008: 403). In this respect, I defined the topic for my interviewees; however, as a researcher, I stayed flexible during the interview process, adapting the plan according to what came up during the interviews. Then in case, specific themes relevant to the topic did not come up in their narrations, I asked them some specific questions.

For instance, I asked one of the women about her definition of Islamic feminism. I asked one of the other women to evaluate herself in the feminist structure although I let them continue in their way in telling their stories. My aim was gaining further insights into their stories while at the same time I was aware, as Scheibelhofer (2008: 408) puts it, that the researcher should not ask questions that are not logically related to what had been said earlier. During these interviews, I realized that how these women differ from each other in terms of sharing their experiences (cf. Möller 2011: 75).

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Indeed, I gave sufficient space to my interviewees to express themselves, and I did not interrupt them during their conversations. Accordingly, some of the interviews lasted for more than 4 hours which made my transcription process very lengthy. These narrations have considerable worth for my research and can open a new path for me in researching women’s movement in Iran.