84 PART ONE: INTRODUCTION theological/theoretical concepts during the interviews rather than on practices and experiences. As already argued with the help of themodel of four voices, the perspective of the community members themselves is central to this study. While presenting my research to fellow PhD candidates, one of them asked me: “Whose theology will you present in the end?” This question touches on the emic/etic debate and made me reflect on my own positionality in this research. The main intention of this study is to articulate the theological insights of the community members – I cannot claim to represent the theology of the entire communities given the limits of this research – but, in the end, I am the one composing the testimonies into a coherent theological rationale. In that sense, one could argue that it is my theology, informed by the experiences of the community members. Inevitably, this entails a hermeneutic moment in which I interpret the data, bringing along my own bias. As John Swinton remarks: [T]he task of the researcher is not to bracket off her prejudices, but to fuse her horizonwith the horizon of the research participants in a way that will deepen and clarify the meaning of the experience being explored. (…) Thus, the task of the reader/researcher is to enter into a constructive, critical dialogue with the text within which a fusion of the two horizons is brought about. That being so, all ethnographic data is seen to be co-construction; a mutually constructed narrative that emerges from the merging of the researcher’s horizon and the horizon of the text.218 In this process, I had to come to an understanding of what the interviewees were saying. Even though the theological language, certainly at first sight, shows resemblance with the language of the intended Catholic readership, the question always remains if the same meaning is attached to this language. In order to do justice to the differences that may occur in this regard, I have tried not to adopt a conceptual terminology that is too strict beforehand. I did, however, consult literature on the subject matter prior and parallel to the empirical inquiry. My research strategy therefore integrates the principles of what is called informed grounded theory: a bottom-up approach that builds a theory from empirical data by inductive reasoning, aware of existing literature but without imposing theoretical frameworks acquired through literary review 218 Swinton, “‘Where Is Your Church?,’” 82–83.
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