ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I take a retrospective look at my research with international students’ experiences in Portugal, to reflect on the issue of voice in qualitative research and on the specificity of conducting research with international students. Even though international students’ experiences are rather complex and diverse, especially due to their transnational and intercultural nature, research in this subfield often falls victim to a deficit view that reduces international students’ experiences to their challenges, difficulties, and supposed deficits. Listening to students’ voices is not enough to surpass this issue if research questions and objectives are embedded in such a problem-oriented perspective of ‘the’ international student experience. In this context, the current chapter provides an example of how to create a research design and environment in which participants’ knowledge of their own experiences is valued, their voices are heard, and reflexivity is encouraged through a continuous interaction between participants and researchers. In this sense, I argue for data construction, as opposed to its mere collection, exemplifying this through the use of biographical/narrative methods. Rather than relying on the traditional process of interviewing, the construction of data occurs during multiple biographical encounters in which new meanings and understandings are dialogically constructed.
