Week 3
Trying out approaches to analysis
• Theoretical sensitivity
• Grounded theory – or constant comparative
method
• Using other sources of ideas (Sanger)
Part of theoretical sensitivity is
having ideas
from Coffey, A. and Atkinson, P. (1996) Making Sense of Qualitative
Data, Sage, London.
• ‘…you can have ideas about the sort of data
you wish to collect, the setting, and the
social actors.
• Those ideas can be about what you aim to
explore, find out, discover, confirm, or
disprove.
• These ideas can be wholly your own or can
use or transform the ideas of others, such as
researchers in the same field, philosophers,
professionals, and the respondents
themselves.
[as long as you cite them of course… AJH ]
• Similarly, the analysis of the data can be informed
by your own ideas about what is going on, or it
can be informed by your respondents’ views of
what they think is happening.
• The kinds of ideas you use, transform, or draw
upon can also be influenced by your
understanding, sympathy, curiosity or antagonism
in relation to particular ‘schools’ of ideas – for
example, critical, Marxist, interactionist, positivist,
feminist, or phenomenological…
• We strongly reject the notion that qualitative
research substitutes for disciplinary perspectives
and theoretical frameworks’ (Coffey and Atkinson,
1996 p.140)
• They talk about using theory as making explicit
what we all do anyway –
‘integrating our ideas with our data collection and
data analysis, generating new ideas and building
on existing ideas’
**Then the quality of qualitative research depends
on the quality of that integration
Grounded theory
• One systematic approach to analysis,
involving ‘coding’ data
• Originally, a piece of research on the impact
on interactions of the awareness of dying
(Glaser and Strauss)
• Intended as a process of inductive discovery
– from the data, to a ‘theory’
Why grounded ‘theory’?
• ‘Theory’ is ambiguous
• Better to think of it as a process of carefully
interpreting data to construct a useful
interpretation
• Resist any implication from others that you do or
don’t have the ‘right’ interpretation
• Rightly ‘haunted by explanations’ (Wittgenstein)
Having a go…
The constant comparative method
• Categorise elements of data – write memos
• Take one category at a time and compare
data in it: comparisons and contrasts are
always conceptual – reflecting some
criterion or other – write memos
• Interpret through this comparison: identify /
construct themes which connect the
categories – write memos
• Describe the limits of this interpretation –
write memos
What we constructed…
Developing this view - Sanger
Start from this….
…. or this?
Seven approaches – Sanger
1. Labels and categories (eg. using those that participants
use)
2. Methodological imports (eg. ‘punctum’ and ‘studium’)
3. Theoretical imports (eg. Derrida, destabilising
assumptions about data)
4. Novel methods (eg. constructing and using critical
incidents)
5. Reporting (eg. writing complete sentences in notes)
6. Metaphors (eg. identifying and reflecting on those that are
commonly used)
7. Alien structures (eg. random or unrelated ideas, applied to
the data)
• Choose two approaches to try out as a
group.
Summary
• The fly in the milk
• Institutionalised – negative, control –
compared to the institution (system,
education, etc)
• ‘work with people’ – what does this express
as a metaphor for her relationship with
colleauges?