Developing a New Major

inductive process – you have lots of bits of data – have to figure out what htey mean

ethnography data analysis look at description – your notes are a view into a specific setting (all the people, the physical look and feel of the place, the activities)

your job – piece all the notes together to tell a story (your interpretation of what all the data pieces mean) – teh story develops slowly from teh data as you get more accustomed to it and organize it into different chunks

to start read thru all your notes and ask yourself these kinds of questions (and make analysis notes with the answers using info and quotes and description from all th enotes)

• what is going on? what does it mean (description is good, but not enough)
• what fits together? What doesn’t fit – things that fit are a theme, a pattern; things that don’t fit might indicate there are other patterns at work or maybe you’re formed your pattern too early or too narrowly

can code the data – might code locations, activities, people involved, have codes for the themes you’ve started to identify

constant comparative method (part of grounded theory) – keep comparing each new piece of data with existing – does it fit (strengthen the pattern), what does it mean, what patterns does it fit into, what makes this piece of info different from other pieces

analysis is putting a puzzle together – except ya don’t know if you have all the pieces and there’s no picture on teh box to know what yo’re making)

need to be comfortable with your data – read thru it several times, mark on it (underline stuff, add the codes)

be sure to write about each theme as you’re developing it, maybe ask people you’ve interviewed about your understanding of hte theme to see if htey agree ; if you have a lot of pieces that don’t fit the themethen may be the theme is wrong (maybe you developed it too early or you missed some iportant bits)

analysis is just as important as data collection – leave big time chunks for both, do both thru out the project

not all the data will fit into your story – but you might also discover that what you thought your story was at the beginning is not true as you work thru the data – a whole new unexpected story might develop

question of whose point of view is being represented in the story – the researchers or the people being researched – new thinking is that you are telling their story, representing their point of view, and realizing that there are multiple realities (since social reality is created among the people involved – different people might have different view of the story of their lives

no objective observation – since your culture, your gender, your race, your past experiences all affect how you interpret what you experience -=— so the story you’re telling of someone elses reality is also affected by those same things

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