From Abstract Concept to Active Participants: Reflections on a Purposive Sample

This article draws upon my experience of conceptualizing, identifying and recruiting interviewees for a doctoral study of Bangladeshi citizens working for social change in their own country. Understanding how these key workers negotiate the complex dilemmas and conflicting demands involved in working for social change adds to our understanding how civil society actors both contribute to, and are constituents of, sustainable human development. Methodologically, the study can be described as a psychoanalytically-informed sociological enquiry, drawing on feminist and decolonial perspectives, that used open-ended life-history and event-centred interviews to elicit multiple ‘small’ personal stories of experience (Phoenix, 2013). From these ‘small’ stories a number of identifiable ‘bigger’ stories, or contextualized narratives (Goodson, 2017), emerged which were analyzed both sociologically, using Bourdieusian social theory, and psychoanalytically in the tradition of British object relations.