Writing
@@ -1022,7 +1021,8 @@ Memos
Charmaz (2014: 180) describes how she developed memos from in vivo codes that recurred throughout across the cases. She asked how the saying was applied in different contexts, its overlapping and varied meaning.
Charmaz (2014: 183-?) encourages adoption of various writing strategies. She notes that “memo-writing requires us to tolerate ambiguity”, which is inherent in the “discovery phase” of research, in which she considers memo-writing to be a part. She encourages adotion of clustering and freewriting techniques to help get the ball rolling (she refers to these as “pre-writing techniques”).
Saldaña (2016) dedicates Chapter 2 to “writing analytic memos”. Saldaña (2016: 44) notes that codes are nothing more than labels until they are analyzed, and remarks that memo-writing is a stage in the process of getting beyond the data. He refers to Stake (1995: 19), who mused that “Good research is not about good methods as much as it is about good thinking”, and in keeping with Charmaz’s (2014) account of memo-writing, memos are tools for doing good thinking.
-Saldaña (2016: 44-45) channels Charmaz in saying that all memos are analytic memos. I identify with his discomfort in writing according to a pre-defined category of memos, and his preference to categorizing them after writing the memo. He also suggests writing a title or brief description to help with sorting.
+Saldaña (2016: 44-45) channels Charmaz in saying that all memos are analytic memos.
+I identify with his discomfort in writing according to a pre-defined category of memos, and his preference to categorizing them after writing the memo. He also suggests writing a title or brief description to help with sorting.
However, like Charmaz, Saldaña does differentiate between memos and “field notes”, which are synonymous with Charmaz’s journal entries. According to Saldaña (2016: 45), Field notes are the researcher’s personal and subjective responses to social actions encountered during data collection.
Saldaña (2016: 53-54) reports on O’Connor’s (2007: 8) conceptualization of contemplation of qualitative data as refraction.
@@ -1033,21 +1033,7 @@ Memos
Preliminary analyses
-Yin (2014: 135-136 5) identifies various strategies for analyzing case study evidence.
-
-A helpful starting point is to “play” with your data. You are searching for patterns, insights, or concepts that seem promising. (Yin 2014: 135)
-
-Citing Miles and Huberman (1994), Yin (2014) lists a few strategies at this playful stage:
-
-- Juxtaposing data from different interviews
-- Putting information into different arrays
-- Making a matrix of categories and placing the evidence within them
-- Tabulating the frequency of different events
-- Putting information in chronological order or using some other temporal scheme
-
-Yin (2014: 135) also emphasizes memo-writing as a core strategy at this stage, citing Corbin and Strauss (2014). These memos should include hints, clues and suggestions that simply put into writing any preliminary interpretation, essentially conceptualizing your data. He uses the specific example of shower thoughts.
-
-Saldaña (2016) dedicates chapter 6 to “post-coding and pre-writing transitions”. He frames these as a series of strategies to help crystallize the analytical work and springboard into written documents and reports.
+Saldaña (2016) dedicates Chapter 6 to “post-coding and pre-writing transitions”. He frames these as a series of strategies to help crystallize the analytical work and springboard into written documents and reports.
Top-10 lists
Saldaña (2016: 274-275) suggests coming up with a list of the ten top quotes or passages as a potentially useful “focusing strategy”. Identify the passages (no longer than half a page each) that strike me as the most vivid and/or representational of my study. He suggests reflecting on the content of these items and arranging them in various orders to discover different ways of structuring or outlining the write-up of the research story. He provides some examples of orders to consider:
@@ -1163,25 +1149,6 @@ Situational analysis<
Clarke (2003) refers to Shim (2000) as an exemplary case of situational analysis in action.
-
-Various other analytical strategies and techniques
-Yin (2014: 136-142) describes four general analytical strategies:
-
-- Relying on theoretical propositions
-- Working your data from the “ground up”
-- Developing a case description
-- Examining plausible rival explanations
-
-Yin (2014: 142-168) then goes on to describe five analytical techniques:
-
-- Pattern matching
-- Explanation building
-- Time-series analysis
-- Logic models
-- Cross-case synthesis
-
-Ryan and Bernard (2000) describe various analysis techniques for analyzing textual elicitations in structured and codified ways.
-
Writing
-Richardson (2000), who frames writing as a method of inquiry. While much of it deals with the history of social science writing and the impact of postmodernism (which I’m honestly not really that interested in, at this point at least), there are some excellent creative writing tips scatttered throughout the latter section. One notable technique is her distinction between four kinds of notes:
-
-- Observation notes: Concrete and detailed, accurate renditions of things I see, hear, feel and taste, and so on. Remain close to the scene as experienced through the senses.
-- Methodological notes: Messages to self about how to collect data — who to talk to, what to wear, when to get in touch.
-- Theoretical notes: Hunches, hypotheses, poststructuralist connections, critiques of what I’m doing/thinking/seeing, keeping me from getting hooked on one view of reality.
-- Personal notes: Uncensored feeling statements about the research, the people I’m talking to, my doubts, anxieties, pleasures. These can also be great sources of hypotheses (for example, if I am feeling anxious, others I’m speaking with might feel the same way, which provides a string to tug on).
-
+Richardson (2000), who frames writing as a method of inquiry. Much of this text deals with the history of social science writing and the impact of postmodernism, which I’m honestly not really that interested in, at this point at least. She does list a series of very broad and somewhat obvious techniques, which I do not really find that helpful.
From Charmaz and Mitchell (1996: 286):
For the most part, social science researchers are not expected to speak, and if they do, we need not listen. While positivism and postmodernism claim to offer open forums, both are suspicious of authors’ voices outside of prescribed forms. Extremists in both camps find corruption in speech. It lacks objectivity and value neutrality in the positivist idiom; it expresses racist, Eurocentric, and phallocentric oppression in the postmodern view. Our point is this: There is merit in humility and deference to subjects’ views, and there is merit in systematic and reasoned discourse. But there is also merit in audible authorship.
-See Charmaz (2000: 526-528) See Charmaz (2014: 183-188) on “pre-writing” techniques, including clustering and freewriting, especially in context of memo-writing.
+
+- See Charmaz (2000: 526-528)
+- See Charmaz (2014: 183-188) on “pre-writing” techniques, including clustering and freewriting, especially in context of memo-writing.
+
Writing techniques
@@ -1297,9 +1261,6 @@ Writing about method
Conrad, Peter. 1990.
“Qualitative Research on Chronic Illness: A Commentary on Method and Conceptual Development.” Social Science & Medicine, Special
Issue Qualitative Research On Chronic Illness, 30 (11): 1257–63.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-9536(90)90266-U.
-Corbin, Juliet M., and Anselm L. Strauss. 2014.
Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Sage publications.
https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=hZ6kBQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=basics+of+qualitative+researcher+2007&ots=6kNcPtaFY3&sig=4teELda869m-icWfk-Em_U8npaU.
-
Denzin, Norman K. 1978.
The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods. McGraw-Hill.
https://books.google.com?id=gfS1AAAAIAAJ.
Writing about method
McGrath, Richard. 2021.
“Journalling and Memoing: Reflexive Qualitative Research Tools.” In
Handbook of Qualitative Research Methodologies in Workplace Contexts, edited by Joanna Crossman and Sarbari Bordia. Edward Elgar Publishing.
https://doi.org/10.4337/9781789904345.00022.
-Miles, Matthew B., and A. M. Huberman. 1994. Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
-
Mishler, Elliot G. 1981. “The Social Construction of Illness.” Social Contexts of Health, Illness, and Patient Care, 141–68.
@@ -1402,9 +1360,6 @@ Writing about method
Riessman, Catherine Kohler. 1990.
“Strategic Uses of Narrative in the Presentation of Self and Illness: A Research Note.” Social Science & Medicine, Special
Issue Qualitative Research On Chronic Illness, 30 (11): 1195–1200.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-9536(90)90259-U.
-Ryan, Gery W., and H. Russell Bernard. 2000. “Data Management and Analysis Methods.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 2nd ed., 769–802. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
-
Saldaña, Johnny. 2016. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. 3rd ed. SAGE.
@@ -1483,7 +1438,14 @@ Writing about method
Very much in line with the pragmatist turn of the late ’90s and early ’00s, as also documented by Lucas (2019: 54-57) in the context of archaeological theory, vis-a-vis positivism, postmodernism, and settling on a middle ground between them.
This seems reminiscient of procedures planned for WP1 and WP2 from my FWO grant application.
This is also very reminiscient of Nicolini (2009).
-I wonder: would Abbott (2004) call these heuristics?
+Contrast this with Richardson (2000), who identified several kinds of notes:
+
+- Observation notes: Concrete and detailed, accurate renditions of things I see, hear, feel and taste, and so on. Remain close to the scene as experienced through the senses.
+- Methodological notes: Messages to self about how to collect data — who to talk to, what to wear, when to get in touch.
+- Theoretical notes: Hunches, hypotheses, poststructuralist connections, critiques of what I’m doing/thinking/seeing, keeping me from getting hooked on one view of reality.
+- Personal notes: Uncensored feeling statements about the research, the people I’m talking to, my doubts, anxieties, pleasures. These can also be great sources of hypotheses (for example, if I am feeling anxious, others I’m speaking with might feel the same way, which provides a string to tug on).
+
+
This caught my eye since its the same approach as that adopted by qc!
diff --git a/research-protocol.pdf b/research-protocol.pdf
index e18b2e4..3102df5 100644
Binary files a/research-protocol.pdf and b/research-protocol.pdf differ
diff --git a/search.json b/search.json
index 7fbb80c..5ac8548 100644
--- a/search.json
+++ b/search.json
@@ -185,14 +185,14 @@
"href": "notes/methodology-notes.html#memos",
"title": "Methodology notes",
"section": "Memos",
- "text": "Memos\nCharmaz (2014: 162) dedicates Chapter 7 to memo-writing, which she frames as “the pivotal intermediate step between data collection and writing drafts of papers.” She locates the power of memo-writing as the prompt to analyze the data and codes early in the research process, which requires the researcher to pause and reflect.\nCharmaz (2014: 162):\n\nMemos catch your thoughts, capture the comparisons and connections you make, and crystallize questions and directions for you to pursue.\n\nCharmaz (2014: 162):\n\nMemo-writing creates an interactive space for conversing with yourself about your data, codes, ideas, and hunches. Questions arise. New ideas occur to you during the act of writing. Your standpoints and assumptions can become visible. You will make discoveries about your data, emerging categories, the developing frame of your analysis — and perhaps about yourself.\n\nCharmaz (2014: 164):\n\nMemo-writing encourages you to stop, focus, take your codes and data apart, compare them, and define links between them. Stop and catch meanings and actions. Get them down on paper and into your computer files.\n\nCharmaz (2014: 164):\n\nMemos are your path to theory constriction. They chronicle what you grappled with and learned along the way.\n\nCharmaz (2014: 165-168) distinguishes between memo-writing and journaling. The former is meant to be more analytical, whereas the latter is more of an account of a direct experience, including significant memories or recollections of moments that stood out (and reflection on why they stood out).\nCharmaz (2014: 171) indicates that “[n]o single mechanical procedure defines a useful memo. Do what is possible with the material you have.” She then lists a few possible approaches to memo-writing:\n\nDefine each code or category by its analytic properties\nSpell out and detail processes subsumed by the codes or categories\nMake comparisons between data and data, data and codes, codes and codes, codes and categories, categories and categories\nBring raw data into the memo\nProvide sufficient empirical evidence to support your definitions of the category and analytic claims about it\nOffer conjectures to check in the field setting(s)\nSort and order codes and categories\nIdentify gaps in the analysis\nInterrogate a code or category by asking questions of it.\n\nCharmaz (2014: 171) draws special attention on bringing data into the memo as a way to more concretely “ground” the abstract analysis in the data and lay the foundation for making claims about them:\n\nIncluding verbatim material from different sources permits you to make precise comparisons right in the memo. These comparisons enable you to define patterns in the empirical world. Thus, memo-writing moves your work beyond individual cases.\n\nThrough a detailed example over the prior several pages, Charmaz (2014: 178) reflects on how memos may “[hint] at how sensitizing concepts, long left silent, may murmur during coding and analysus”. She recalls how writing a memo encouraged her to look back at ideas presented in pivotal texts that she had read earlier in her career, and thereby committed her to a new strand of thought.\nCharmaz (2014: 180) describes how she developed memos from in vivo codes that recurred throughout across the cases. She asked how the saying was applied in different contexts, its overlapping and varied meaning.\nCharmaz (2014: 183-?) encourages adoption of various writing strategies. She notes that “memo-writing requires us to tolerate ambiguity”, which is inherent in the “discovery phase” of research, in which she considers memo-writing to be a part. She encourages adotion of clustering and freewriting techniques to help get the ball rolling (she refers to these as “pre-writing techniques”).\nSaldaña (2016) dedicates Chapter 2 to “writing analytic memos”. Saldaña (2016: 44) notes that codes are nothing more than labels until they are analyzed, and remarks that memo-writing is a stage in the process of getting beyond the data. He refers to Stake (1995: 19), who mused that “Good research is not about good methods as much as it is about good thinking”, and in keeping with Charmaz’s (2014) account of memo-writing, memos are tools for doing good thinking.\nSaldaña (2016: 44-45) channels Charmaz in saying that all memos are analytic memos. I identify with his discomfort in writing according to a pre-defined category of memos, and his preference to categorizing them after writing the memo. He also suggests writing a title or brief description to help with sorting.\nHowever, like Charmaz, Saldaña does differentiate between memos and “field notes”, which are synonymous with Charmaz’s journal entries. According to Saldaña (2016: 45), Field notes are the researcher’s personal and subjective responses to social actions encountered during data collection.\nSaldaña (2016: 53-54) reports on O’Connor’s (2007: 8) conceptualization of contemplation of qualitative data as refraction.\n\nThis perspective acknowledes the mirrored reality and the researcher’s lens as dimpled and broken, obscured in places, operating as a concave or at other times a convex lens. As such, it throws unexpected and distorted images back. It does not imitate what looks into the mirror but deliberately highlights some things and obscures others. It is deliciously … unpredictable in terms of what might be revealed and what might remain hidden.\n\nOther analogies include that by Stern (2007: 119): If data are the building blocks of the developing theory, memos are the mortar”, and by Birks and Mills (2015: 40) who consider memos as the “lubricant” of the analytic machine, and “a series of snapshots that chronicle your study experience”.\nSee Montgomery and Bailey (2007) and McGrath (2021) for more on the distinction between memos and field notes, including detailed examples of these kinds of writing in action."
+ "text": "Memos\nCharmaz (2014: 162) dedicates Chapter 7 to memo-writing, which she frames as “the pivotal intermediate step between data collection and writing drafts of papers.” She locates the power of memo-writing as the prompt to analyze the data and codes early in the research process, which requires the researcher to pause and reflect.\nCharmaz (2014: 162):\n\nMemos catch your thoughts, capture the comparisons and connections you make, and crystallize questions and directions for you to pursue.\n\nCharmaz (2014: 162):\n\nMemo-writing creates an interactive space for conversing with yourself about your data, codes, ideas, and hunches. Questions arise. New ideas occur to you during the act of writing. Your standpoints and assumptions can become visible. You will make discoveries about your data, emerging categories, the developing frame of your analysis — and perhaps about yourself.\n\nCharmaz (2014: 164):\n\nMemo-writing encourages you to stop, focus, take your codes and data apart, compare them, and define links between them. Stop and catch meanings and actions. Get them down on paper and into your computer files.\n\nCharmaz (2014: 164):\n\nMemos are your path to theory constriction. They chronicle what you grappled with and learned along the way.\n\nCharmaz (2014: 165-168) distinguishes between memo-writing and journaling. The former is meant to be more analytical, whereas the latter is more of an account of a direct experience, including significant memories or recollections of moments that stood out (and reflection on why they stood out).\nCharmaz (2014: 171) indicates that “[n]o single mechanical procedure defines a useful memo. Do what is possible with the material you have.” She then lists a few possible approaches to memo-writing:\n\nDefine each code or category by its analytic properties\nSpell out and detail processes subsumed by the codes or categories\nMake comparisons between data and data, data and codes, codes and codes, codes and categories, categories and categories\nBring raw data into the memo\nProvide sufficient empirical evidence to support your definitions of the category and analytic claims about it\nOffer conjectures to check in the field setting(s)\nSort and order codes and categories\nIdentify gaps in the analysis\nInterrogate a code or category by asking questions of it.\n\nCharmaz (2014: 171) draws special attention on bringing data into the memo as a way to more concretely “ground” the abstract analysis in the data and lay the foundation for making claims about them:\n\nIncluding verbatim material from different sources permits you to make precise comparisons right in the memo. These comparisons enable you to define patterns in the empirical world. Thus, memo-writing moves your work beyond individual cases.\n\nThrough a detailed example over the prior several pages, Charmaz (2014: 178) reflects on how memos may “[hint] at how sensitizing concepts, long left silent, may murmur during coding and analysus”. She recalls how writing a memo encouraged her to look back at ideas presented in pivotal texts that she had read earlier in her career, and thereby committed her to a new strand of thought.\nCharmaz (2014: 180) describes how she developed memos from in vivo codes that recurred throughout across the cases. She asked how the saying was applied in different contexts, its overlapping and varied meaning.\nCharmaz (2014: 183-?) encourages adoption of various writing strategies. She notes that “memo-writing requires us to tolerate ambiguity”, which is inherent in the “discovery phase” of research, in which she considers memo-writing to be a part. She encourages adotion of clustering and freewriting techniques to help get the ball rolling (she refers to these as “pre-writing techniques”).\nSaldaña (2016) dedicates Chapter 2 to “writing analytic memos”. Saldaña (2016: 44) notes that codes are nothing more than labels until they are analyzed, and remarks that memo-writing is a stage in the process of getting beyond the data. He refers to Stake (1995: 19), who mused that “Good research is not about good methods as much as it is about good thinking”, and in keeping with Charmaz’s (2014) account of memo-writing, memos are tools for doing good thinking.\nSaldaña (2016: 44-45) channels Charmaz in saying that all memos are analytic memos.7\nI identify with his discomfort in writing according to a pre-defined category of memos, and his preference to categorizing them after writing the memo. He also suggests writing a title or brief description to help with sorting.\nHowever, like Charmaz, Saldaña does differentiate between memos and “field notes”, which are synonymous with Charmaz’s journal entries. According to Saldaña (2016: 45), Field notes are the researcher’s personal and subjective responses to social actions encountered during data collection.\nSaldaña (2016: 53-54) reports on O’Connor’s (2007: 8) conceptualization of contemplation of qualitative data as refraction.\n\nThis perspective acknowledes the mirrored reality and the researcher’s lens as dimpled and broken, obscured in places, operating as a concave or at other times a convex lens. As such, it throws unexpected and distorted images back. It does not imitate what looks into the mirror but deliberately highlights some things and obscures others. It is deliciously … unpredictable in terms of what might be revealed and what might remain hidden.\n\nOther analogies include that by Stern (2007: 119): If data are the building blocks of the developing theory, memos are the mortar”, and by Birks and Mills (2015: 40) who consider memos as the “lubricant” of the analytic machine, and “a series of snapshots that chronicle your study experience”.\nSee Montgomery and Bailey (2007) and McGrath (2021) for more on the distinction between memos and field notes, including detailed examples of these kinds of writing in action."
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- "text": "Preliminary analyses\nYin (2014: 135-136 5) identifies various strategies for analyzing case study evidence.\n\nA helpful starting point is to “play” with your data. You are searching for patterns, insights, or concepts that seem promising. (Yin 2014: 135)\n\nCiting Miles and Huberman (1994), Yin (2014) lists a few strategies at this playful stage:\n\nJuxtaposing data from different interviews\nPutting information into different arrays\nMaking a matrix of categories and placing the evidence within them\nTabulating the frequency of different events\nPutting information in chronological order or using some other temporal scheme\n\nYin (2014: 135) also emphasizes memo-writing as a core strategy at this stage, citing Corbin and Strauss (2014). These memos should include hints, clues and suggestions that simply put into writing any preliminary interpretation, essentially conceptualizing your data. He uses the specific example of shower thoughts.\n\nSaldaña (2016) dedicates chapter 6 to “post-coding and pre-writing transitions”. He frames these as a series of strategies to help crystallize the analytical work and springboard into written documents and reports.\n\nTop-10 lists\nSaldaña (2016: 274-275) suggests coming up with a list of the ten top quotes or passages as a potentially useful “focusing strategy”. Identify the passages (no longer than half a page each) that strike me as the most vivid and/or representational of my study. He suggests reflecting on the content of these items and arranging them in various orders to discover different ways of structuring or outlining the write-up of the research story. He provides some examples of orders to consider:\n\nchronologically\nhierarchically\ntelescopically\nepisodically\nnarratively\nfrom the expository to the dramatic\nfrom the mundane to the insightful\nfrom the smallest detail to the bigger picture\n\n\n\nThe study’s “trinity”\nSaldaña (2016: 275-276) suggests identifying the three (and only three) major codes, categories, themes and/or concepts generated thus far that strike me or stand out in my study. He suggests identifying which one is dominant, how does this status relate to or impact the other codes or concepts, and generally trace the relationships between these ideas. He suggests plotting them as a venn diagram to identify what aspects overlap across items, and to label those areas of overlap — although he does not mention this explicitly, I imagine these points of overlap represent the synthesis of new emergent ideas.\n\n\nCodeweaving\nSaldaña (2016: 276) addresses codeweaving as a viable strategy, but I don’t actually think of it as that useful for my purposes. Seems a but contrived and has lots of potential to be over-engineered.\n\n\nFrom coding to theorizing\nFor Saldaña (2016: 278), the stage at which he finds theories emerging in his mind is when he starts coming up with categories of categories. At this point, a level of abstraction occurs that transcends the particulars of a study, enabling generalizable transfer to other comparable contexts.\nSaldaña (2016: 278-279) identifies a few structures through which these categories of categories might emerge:\n\nSuperordindate and Subordinate Arrangements: Arrange categories as an outline, which suggests discrete linearity and classification. Supercategories and subcategories are “ranked” with numbers or capital letters.\nTaxonomy: Categories and their subcategories are grouped but without any inferred hierarchy; each category seems to have equal weight.\nHierarchy: Categories are ordered from most to least in some manner, i.e. frequency, importance, impact, etc.\nOverlap: Some categories share particular features with others while retaining their unique properties.\nSequential Order: The action suggested by categories progresses in a linear manner.\nConcurrency: Two or more categories operate simultaneously to influence and affect a third.\nDomino Effects: Categories cascade forward in multiple pathways.\nNetworks: Categories interact and interplay in complex pathways to suggest interrelationship.\n\nThe arrows connecting categories are meaningful in their own right. Saldaña (2016: 280) references Urquhart (2013) who states that category relationships are necessary to develop assertions, propositions, hypotheses and theories. He suggests inserting words or phrases between categories that plausibly establishes their connections, as suggested by the data and analytical memos. Saldaña (2016: 280-281) lists several possible connectors:\n\naccelerates\ncontributes toward\ndepends on the types of\ndrives\nfacilitates\nharnesses\nincreases\nincreases the difficulty of\nis affected by\nis essential for\nis necessary for\nprovides\nreconciles\nreduces\nresults in\nresults in achieving\ntriggers\nvaries according to\nwill help to\n\nMoreover, Saldaña (2016: 281) suggests that if you end up with categories as nouns or noun phrases, it could be helpful to transform them into gerund phrases. This will help get a better sense of process and action between catagories.\n\n\nFindings “at a glance”\nFollowing Henwood and Pidgeon (2003), Saldaña (2016: 283) suggests creating a tri-column chart that outlines the findings and the sources of evidence and reasoning that underlie them. See the specific page for a good example."
+ "text": "Preliminary analyses\nSaldaña (2016) dedicates Chapter 6 to “post-coding and pre-writing transitions”. He frames these as a series of strategies to help crystallize the analytical work and springboard into written documents and reports.\n\nTop-10 lists\nSaldaña (2016: 274-275) suggests coming up with a list of the ten top quotes or passages as a potentially useful “focusing strategy”. Identify the passages (no longer than half a page each) that strike me as the most vivid and/or representational of my study. He suggests reflecting on the content of these items and arranging them in various orders to discover different ways of structuring or outlining the write-up of the research story. He provides some examples of orders to consider:\n\nchronologically\nhierarchically\ntelescopically\nepisodically\nnarratively\nfrom the expository to the dramatic\nfrom the mundane to the insightful\nfrom the smallest detail to the bigger picture\n\n\n\nThe study’s “trinity”\nSaldaña (2016: 275-276) suggests identifying the three (and only three) major codes, categories, themes and/or concepts generated thus far that strike me or stand out in my study. He suggests identifying which one is dominant, how does this status relate to or impact the other codes or concepts, and generally trace the relationships between these ideas. He suggests plotting them as a venn diagram to identify what aspects overlap across items, and to label those areas of overlap — although he does not mention this explicitly, I imagine these points of overlap represent the synthesis of new emergent ideas.\n\n\nCodeweaving\nSaldaña (2016: 276) addresses codeweaving as a viable strategy, but I don’t actually think of it as that useful for my purposes. Seems a but contrived and has lots of potential to be over-engineered.\n\n\nFrom coding to theorizing\nFor Saldaña (2016: 278), the stage at which he finds theories emerging in his mind is when he starts coming up with categories of categories. At this point, a level of abstraction occurs that transcends the particulars of a study, enabling generalizable transfer to other comparable contexts.\nSaldaña (2016: 278-279) identifies a few structures through which these categories of categories might emerge:\n\nSuperordindate and Subordinate Arrangements: Arrange categories as an outline, which suggests discrete linearity and classification. Supercategories and subcategories are “ranked” with numbers or capital letters.\nTaxonomy: Categories and their subcategories are grouped but without any inferred hierarchy; each category seems to have equal weight.\nHierarchy: Categories are ordered from most to least in some manner, i.e. frequency, importance, impact, etc.\nOverlap: Some categories share particular features with others while retaining their unique properties.\nSequential Order: The action suggested by categories progresses in a linear manner.\nConcurrency: Two or more categories operate simultaneously to influence and affect a third.\nDomino Effects: Categories cascade forward in multiple pathways.\nNetworks: Categories interact and interplay in complex pathways to suggest interrelationship.\n\nThe arrows connecting categories are meaningful in their own right. Saldaña (2016: 280) references Urquhart (2013) who states that category relationships are necessary to develop assertions, propositions, hypotheses and theories. He suggests inserting words or phrases between categories that plausibly establishes their connections, as suggested by the data and analytical memos. Saldaña (2016: 280-281) lists several possible connectors:\n\naccelerates\ncontributes toward\ndepends on the types of\ndrives\nfacilitates\nharnesses\nincreases\nincreases the difficulty of\nis affected by\nis essential for\nis necessary for\nprovides\nreconciles\nreduces\nresults in\nresults in achieving\ntriggers\nvaries according to\nwill help to\n\nMoreover, Saldaña (2016: 281) suggests that if you end up with categories as nouns or noun phrases, it could be helpful to transform them into gerund phrases. This will help get a better sense of process and action between catagories.\n\n\nFindings “at a glance”\nFollowing Henwood and Pidgeon (2003), Saldaña (2016: 283) suggests creating a tri-column chart that outlines the findings and the sources of evidence and reasoning that underlie them. See the specific page for a good example."
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@@ -208,13 +208,6 @@
"section": "Situational analysis",
"text": "Situational analysis\nSituational analysis originates from Strauss’s social worlds/arenas/negotiations framework. From Clarke (2003: 554):\n\nBuilding on and extending Strauss’s work, situational analyses offer three main cartographic approaches:\n\nsituational maps that lay out the major human, nonhuman, discursive, and other elements in the research situation of concern and provoke analyses of relations among them;\nsocial worlds/arenas maps that lay out the collective actors, key nonhuman elements, and the arena(s) of commitment within which they are engaged in ongoing negotiations, or mesolevel interpretations of the situation; and\npositional maps that lay out the major positions taken, and not taken, in the data vis-à-vis particular discursive axes of variation and difference, con cern, and controversy surrounding complicated issues in the situation.\n\n\nClarke (2003: 560) identifies the main purpose of situational data as a way of “opening up” the data, figuing out where and how to enter:\n\nAlthough they may do so, a major and perhaps the major use for them is “opening up” the data –— interrogating them in fresh ways. As researchers, we constantly confront the problem of “where and how to enter.” Doing situational analyses offers new paths into the full array of data sources and lays out in various ways what you have to date. These approaches should be considered analytic exercises — constituting an ongoing research “work out” of sorts—well into the research trajectory. Their most important outcome is provoking the researcher to analyze more deeply.\n\nShe emphasizes that this is meant to stimulate thinking, and should always be paired with comprehensive memoing before, during and after situation mapping excercises.\nA key feature that I think is invaluable is the ability to uncover the sites of silence, or the things that I as a researcher suspect are there but are not readily visible in my evidence. Situational analysis is useful for drawing out the thousand pound gorillas in the room that no one wants to talk about, and is therefore important for identifying things to address during continual data collection, as is one of the (often ignored) central pillars of grounded theory:\n\nThe fourth and last caveat is perhaps the most radical. As trained scholars in our varied fields, usually with some theoretical background, we may also suspect that certain things may be going on that have not yet explicitly appeared in our data. As ethically accountable researchers, I believe we need to attempt to articulate what we see as the sites of silence in our data. What seems present but unarticulated? What thousand-pound gorillas are sitting around in our situations of concern that nobody has bothered to mention as yet (Zerubavel 2002)? Why not? How might we pursue these sites of silence and ask about the gorillas without putting words in the mouths of our participants? These are very important directions for theoretical sampling. That is, the usefulness of the approaches elucidated here consists partly in helping the researcher think systematically through the design of research, espe cially decisions regarding future data to collect.\n\nThe process is remarkably similar to the brainstorming excercise I did with Costis one time. Starts by articulating the actors involved, their roles and relationships, the things they do, the things they make.\n\nThe goal here is to lay out as best one can all the human and nonhuman elements in the situation of concern of the research broadly conceived. In the Meadian sense, the questions are: Who and what are in this situation? Who and what matters in this situation? What elements “make a difference” in this situation?\n\nAfter jotting these down on a canvas or whiteboard, arrange them into more concrete categories. In each category, refer to examples or specific instances. Concepts can occur in multiple categories. By arranging these concepts, grouping them thematically, spatially, and through relationships and associations with arrows or lines (presumably, with labels indicating the nature of these relationships), this provides the researcher with a viable way of unlocking new pathways to think through their data. I imagine this will be especially helpful when arranging or re-arranging the coding tree.\nClarke (2003: 569-570) also dedicates a few paragraphs to relational forms of analysis using this technique:\n\nRelations among the various elements are key. You might not think to ask about certain relations, but if you do what I think of as quick and dirty relational analyses with the situational map, they can be revealing. The procedure here is to take each element in turn and think about it in relation to each other element on the map. One does this by circling one element and mentally or literally drawing lines, one at a time, between it and every other ele ment on the map and specifying the nature of the relationship by describing the nature of that line.\n\n\nYou could highlight (in blue perhaps) that organization’s perspectives on all the other actors to see which actors are attended to and which are not, as well as the actual contents of the organization’s discourses on its “others.” Silences can thus be made to speak.\n\nClarke (2003: 569) On how to generate memos from situational analysis:\n\nEach map in turn should lead to a memo about the relations diagrammed. At early stages of analysis, such memos should be partial and tentative, full of questions to be answered about the nature and range of particular sets of social relations, rather than being answers in and of themselves.\n\nClarke (2003: 570) addresses the energy or mood required to do this kind of work, which is reminiscient of Yin’s (2014: 73-74) description of the “mental and emotional exhaustion at the end of each fieldwork day, due to the depletion of ‘analytic energy’ associated with being attention on your toes.” Interesting that the mention of “freshness” is brought up in the context of Glaser’s tabla rasa approach to grounded theory.\n\nAs a practical matter, doing the situational map and then the relational analyses it organizes can be tiring and/or anxiety producing and/or elating. Work on it until you feel stale and then take a break. This is not the same order of work as entering bibliographic citations. The fresher you are, the more you can usually see. Glaser (1978: 18-35) cautions against prematurely discussing emergent ideas –— that we might not necessarily benefit from talking about everything right away but rather from reflection — and memoing. I strongly agree, especially about early even if quick and dirty memoing. But we all must find our own ways of working best. For most, the work of this map occurs over time and through multiple efforts and multiple memos.\n\nClarke (2003) refers to Shim (2000) as an exemplary case of situational analysis in action."
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- "text": "Various other analytical strategies and techniques\nYin (2014: 136-142) describes four general analytical strategies:\n\nRelying on theoretical propositions\nWorking your data from the “ground up”\nDeveloping a case description\nExamining plausible rival explanations\n\nYin (2014: 142-168) then goes on to describe five analytical techniques:7\n\nPattern matching\nExplanation building\nTime-series analysis\nLogic models\nCross-case synthesis\n\nRyan and Bernard (2000) describe various analysis techniques for analyzing textual elicitations in structured and codified ways."
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- "text": "Footnotes\n\n\nThe term refers to a medieval jousting target: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintain_(jousting)↩︎\nThough Yin (2014: 40-444) is dismissive of such use of the term “sample” since he sees case study research as only generalizable to similar situations, and not to a general population from which a sample is typically said to be drawn. I agree with this focus on concrete situations over Stake’s prioritization of theory-building as an end unto itself.↩︎\nCharmaz uses the term “giving voice” in this specific context. I’m not sure if this is meant to represent Strauss and Corbin’s attitude, and whether this is an accurate representation on their views, but in my mind this should be framed as elevating, amplifying or re-articulating respondents’ voices (and this is a tenet of constructivist grounded theory in general, which derives from Charmaz). My take diverges from the position that we “give voice” to respondents in that it acknowledges (1) that the voices are already there, (2) that respondents are in fact giving us their voices, and (3) that the researcher plays an active editorial role, transforming the respondents’ elicitations into a format that is more amenable to analysis.↩︎\nVery much in line with the pragmatist turn of the late ’90s and early ’00s, as also documented by Lucas (2019: 54-57) in the context of archaeological theory, vis-a-vis positivism, postmodernism, and settling on a middle ground between them.↩︎\nThis seems reminiscient of procedures planned for WP1 and WP2 from my FWO grant application.↩︎\nThis is also very reminiscient of Nicolini (2009).↩︎\nI wonder: would Abbott (2004) call these heuristics?↩︎\nThis caught my eye since its the same approach as that adopted by qc!↩︎"
+ "text": "Footnotes\n\n\nThe term refers to a medieval jousting target: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintain_(jousting)↩︎\nThough Yin (2014: 40-444) is dismissive of such use of the term “sample” since he sees case study research as only generalizable to similar situations, and not to a general population from which a sample is typically said to be drawn. I agree with this focus on concrete situations over Stake’s prioritization of theory-building as an end unto itself.↩︎\nCharmaz uses the term “giving voice” in this specific context. I’m not sure if this is meant to represent Strauss and Corbin’s attitude, and whether this is an accurate representation on their views, but in my mind this should be framed as elevating, amplifying or re-articulating respondents’ voices (and this is a tenet of constructivist grounded theory in general, which derives from Charmaz). My take diverges from the position that we “give voice” to respondents in that it acknowledges (1) that the voices are already there, (2) that respondents are in fact giving us their voices, and (3) that the researcher plays an active editorial role, transforming the respondents’ elicitations into a format that is more amenable to analysis.↩︎\nVery much in line with the pragmatist turn of the late ’90s and early ’00s, as also documented by Lucas (2019: 54-57) in the context of archaeological theory, vis-a-vis positivism, postmodernism, and settling on a middle ground between them.↩︎\nThis seems reminiscient of procedures planned for WP1 and WP2 from my FWO grant application.↩︎\nThis is also very reminiscient of Nicolini (2009).↩︎\nContrast this with Richardson (2000), who identified several kinds of notes:\n\nObservation notes: Concrete and detailed, accurate renditions of things I see, hear, feel and taste, and so on. Remain close to the scene as experienced through the senses.\nMethodological notes: Messages to self about how to collect data — who to talk to, what to wear, when to get in touch.\nTheoretical notes: Hunches, hypotheses, poststructuralist connections, critiques of what I’m doing/thinking/seeing, keeping me from getting hooked on one view of reality.\nPersonal notes: Uncensored feeling statements about the research, the people I’m talking to, my doubts, anxieties, pleasures. These can also be great sources of hypotheses (for example, if I am feeling anxious, others I’m speaking with might feel the same way, which provides a string to tug on).\n\n↩︎\nThis caught my eye since its the same approach as that adopted by qc!↩︎"
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