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3. Methodology and Research Design

3.3. Interviews – Research Design and Sampling of personal narratives

39 has spent traveling enabled him to feel at home everywhere in the world, independently of place, family or cultural identity, whereby he also describes how he can choose identities as he pleases, with a worldview he regards as relative, rather than absolute. He sees himself as a member of intercontinental wanderers, whose home is found in airport transit lounges.113

Sara Mansfield Taber, a daughter of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, spent her childhood between Europe, the U.S. and the Far East and she writes in her chapter about the struggles and how deeply she was affected by having to move around so much as a young girl.

She also mentions as how she balanced inner conflicts about loyalties to many different places that she became attached to during her upbringing. She recalls how she counteracts the loneliness of her uprooted childhood by immersing herself in new environments, by learning another language and through the help of her family ties.114

Camilla Trinchieri was born in the Czech Republic and by the time she is twelve, she has already lived in six different countries and describes in the memoir her experiences growing up with so many relocations. She recalls in her memoir how she collected memories of many childhood homes, keeping the connection to these alive by writing and by depersonalising and selecting specific memories, as well as denying and distancing from some. Her focus is on taking memories that are positive, such as the appreciation for a place, easiness with language, a cosmopolite way of thinking and being able to adapt to new surroundings.115

40 to deeply reflect during the time of the interview, therefore, it opens a space for them to experience powerful interactions with things, places and people, as well as for them to remember these strong emotional interactions from the past.117 Moreover, autobiographical narrative interviews are regarded as providing rich data that give an outlook on the dynamic and complex relations between the personal and the social world of interviewees. As this connection is a crucial one for TCIs in terms of creating a sense of home and belonging, it provided a preferred method to extract those narratives in more detail. Noteworthy to mention as well is the role that is attributed to the narrators, who are given a strong perspective of self-agency as they are regarded as not only the actors of their life story, but also as the authors of their narrations, and, therefore, have strong power in shaping these narrations.118 All in all, designing the interview guide in such way provided a feasible qualitative technique in order to extract rich personal narratives that were needed for the overall analysis of this thesis.

As stated in the theoretical framework, there are different understandings of what it means to be a TCI, making it a rather vague concept. Being aware of this and for the purpose of the thesis, the following criteria were used for the selection of interviewees. Firstly, the participants in this study needed to have experienced a cross-national experience before the age of 18. Secondly, they needed to have lived at least one year away from their legal country, meaning their passport country or country of (permanent) residency, before the age of 18 and this mobility or move needed to occur to a European country, to both take into consideration the original definition of TCK and to establish the European dimension for the sample. Thirdly, the relocation must have been based on the fact that the parents had to move for professional reasons with the intention that this would be a temporary solution only and that at any given point a return to the legal country was planned, thus, indicating a temporary stay. Nonetheless, for this study, respondents were included as well that did not migrate back to their legal countries. As long as the aforementioned criteria were fulfilled, and this intention was stated by the respondents that the parent’s intended to migrate back, they were appropriate interview partners. This also includes those TCIs as well, who may finally have decided to take a different

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Maruska Svasek and Markieta Domecka, ‘The Autobiographical Narrative Interview: A Potential Arena of Emotional Remembering, Performance and Reflection’, 2012, 107–26,

https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474214230.ch-004.

117 Svasek and Domecka, ‘The Autobiographical Narrative Interview: A Potential Arena of Emotional Remembering, Performance and Reflection,’ 25.

118 Svasek and Domecka, ‘The Autobiographical Narrative Interview: A Potential Arena of Emotional Remembering, Performance and Reflection,’ 43.

41 decision than the intended return to the passport country of the parents, and who decided to move either to a new country altogether or to stay in the host country or geographical location.

The interview participants were recruited through personal networking, purposive sampling in the first instance and then snowball sampling. Overall, ten potential participants were directly contacted, of whom eight agreed to do an interview for the purpose of this thesis.

The interviews were conducted with the help of the online video conference tool, Teams, which was readily available through the university IT networks. The interviews lasted between 55 minutes and 1 hour and 32 minutes and they were conducted during the months of April and May 2022. Respondents came from all sorts of different backgrounds, which includes the pool of all the TCIs legal countries and geographical locations that made up a part of the interviewees’ backgrounds, amounting to eleven European countries and two non-European countries in the study. The respondents were between 22-27 years old (see also Figure 2 below).

No.

Respondent

Gender Age Legal

country/countries

Geographical locations

Reason for moving R1,

Alessandro

M 24 Italy, Croatia Austria,

Germany

Parent’s business relocation R2,

Christina

F 22 Austria, China Germany,

Austria

Parent’s business relocation

R3, Marie F 27 Sweden, USA Sweden, U.S.,

Netherlands

Parent’s job offer

R4, Nikola M 23 Serbia, Italy Serbia, Italy, Austria

Parents’ job offers

R5, Danijela F 25 Austria Serbia,

Austria, UK(England), France

Diplomatic relocation

R6, Federica F 26 Switzerland, France

Austria, Germany

Parent’s job offer

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R7, Ava F 27 Sweden, UK

(England), Switzerland

UK (England), Switzerland, Italy, France

Parent’s job offer/business relocation

R8, Oceane F 22 France Switzerland,

France, Netherlands, Poland, UK (England)

Parent’s job offer

Figure 2: Interview participants

After finishing the interviews, the conversations were transcribed verbatim, and the personal information of respondents anonymised and pseudonymised to guarantee their privacy and to respect the ethical standards provided by both universities undertaking supervision for the thesis. After the transcription and anonymisation of personal data, the different transcripts were imported for analysis purposes into MAXQDA, an all-in-one tool for qualitative data analysis.

It is relevant to mention here as well that the selection process for both interview respondents and stories in the books were of different nature. While the books included pre-selected stories of rather public figures, the selection of respondents can be seen of more a mundane or ordinary nature, with most of them being students or young professionals quite at the beginning of their professional careers. As the stories need to be marketed and sold to the readers, it becomes obvious that the significance in social status and career of the people included in the books is of relevance, giving these individuals already a more exclusive and prominent character. As mentioned, TCIs as a migrant category is already privileged, however, even within the category of social classes there are nuances. To give this research a more inclusive character, combining more mundane and ordinary respondents with public people’s perspectives from the memoirs provides opportunities to include more varied perspectives and to get a more encompassing result and comparability of notions of home and belonging for TCIs. Nonetheless, it is also essential to highlight that this whole methodological approach might pose limitations as well. The differences in age, social status, career, and life trajectories, and as with any lived experience of humans who might be vastly different, there are no static categories or approaches that can be taken, as each life is in and of itself highly individual. This in turn already presupposes less comparability within that specific migrant category.

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