In England, as in many Western countries, reforms since the 1980s have recast the historical relationships between governors, headteachers, parents, local government and the state. This paper discusses the analysis of interview data within a project funded by the Spencer Foundation to examine the role of women as school governors in England between 1870 and 1995.Interviews with women school governors were part of a multi-method approach in which autobiographical and biographical material, including archival material, was drawn on to investigate the social, cultural and economic background of women governors, and for network analysis. Archival data were used to elucidate formal constitutions of governing bodies, committee structures, details of women's roles as governors in individual schools, and the relation of different types of schools to administrative structures of education, including the local education authority and the state. Interviews were conducted to glean from women their subjective understandings and experiences of aspects of school governance but also to compensate for the lack of historical records for many state-maintained girls' schools and the closure of records under the Data Protection Act. Former and current governors were interviewed, some with experience pre-dating the 1980s. Interview data was also used to immerse researchers into the culture and community of governors and governance.We were aware that our own questions and categories inevitably played a part in 'calling forth' the account that we were attempting to construct (Weiler, 1999). The paper discusses how we drew on the 'voice-centred relational method' (Mauther and Doucet,1998) in which researchers use different ways of writing about and relating to interview data in order to sensitize themselves to their own values and presuppositions in approaching data analysis. In the paper we examine the analysis of the interviews through grounded theory, which we are using to explore what constituted power and authority in particularly situations (Strauss and Corbin, 1998); and to link the specificities of the experience of women school governors with broader theoretical concerns about the nature of school governance. We are interested in why and how women governors explained, rationalised and made sense of their past (and present) experience, as well as how women's governor identities were formed. Following Summerfield (1998) and Sangster (1988) we are interested in language as a means by which women governors articulated their experience through the interviews. We pay attention to the contexts in which interview narratives were produced and the relationships of power through which various accounts were given (Weiler 1999), as well as the performance models of the interviews (Summerfield, 1998). The paper discusses how this has oriented us towards analysis of narrative identities, which depend on repetition (Gardner 2003), and towards examining key phrases and key patterns in the interviews (Chanfrault-Duchet, 2000). During the interviews, we also used a form of 'narrative interruption', akin to 'narrative history' (Gardner 2003). Ways in which these various approaches to the interview data is informing ongoing analysis of women's contribution to school governance will be discussed.