Preparing for Data Collection and Engaging in Interpretation: Making the Familiar Complex
By Charles Vanover, University of South Florida, USA and Paul Mihas, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
In this guest blog post Charles Vanover and Paul Mihas, the August 2021 SAGE Methodspace Mentors in Residence, invite two individuals interested in qualitative research to learn from three qualitative researchers’ discussions on data analysis practices. Michelle Angelo-Rocha, University of South Florida, Sheryl L. Chatfield, Kent State University, and Sally Campbell Galman, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, share their particular, innovative approaches to qualitative analysis at a symposium at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI 2021). Charles and Paul discuss these presenters’ insights into qualitative data analysis in their post.
Many of the practices qualitative researchers engage—such as conducting interviews and writing memos—are familiar from other contexts. What is unfamiliar and challenging is engaging in these practices to respond to a set of particular research questions in a real study in real time. In this blog, we discuss how everyday activities such as listening and drawing become more complex when performed as part of a qualitative study. We hope to especially help beginning qualitative researchers imagine the challenges of doing this work and conceptualize some core issues in design and analysis. We do this by referring to a set of talks about qualitative data analysis given by contributors to a new book from SAGE, Analyzing and Interpreting Qualitative Research: After the Interview (Vanover, Mihas, & Saldaña, 2022). Readers are welcome to engage with our discussion or go directly to the bottom of the page and click on video from sessions by Michelle Angelo-Rocha, University of South Florida, Sheryl L. Chatfield, Kent State University, and Sally Campbell Galman, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, this May at ICQI 2021.
Across the qualitative life cycle, when qualitative researchers design their studies, conduct their interviews, and analyze their data, they find themselves in positions where they must do ordinary things well to achieve their study goals. People have listened to other people tell stories for millennia, and they have told stories about the stories they heard. The challenge for qualitative researchers is to find the best ways to help people share their stories and to figure out how to ask questions that help people tell the stories that matter. Countless people, in fields ranging from law to medicine to sociology, have transcribed dialogue and made meaning from interviews, depositions, and other formal speech acts. The challenge for qualitative researchers is to find accurate and meaningful ways to transform what they heard during interviews into trustworthy material for the next stage of their investigations. Qualitative researchers must ask themselves: “What can we build from this evidence? What claims can we make and what stories can we tell?” Countless people have written up their research and published their work in books and articles. The challenge for qualitative researchers is finding the most relevant ways to connect to audiences who care about this content both in the university and in the community. Beginning qualitative researchers confront an additional challenge—they must “learn on the job,” incrementally learning the skills of analysis and interpretation as they go.
Michelle Angelo-Rocha’s session at ICQI 2021, linked below, illustrates one aspect of this complexity. For her master’s thesis, Michelle interviewed a group of students who were immigrants and English language learners. To conduct these interviews well, Michelle had to find ways to build relationships with these young people. Michelle believed she and the people who read her research would learn more from the interviews if the participants trusted her to describe their experience. In her ICQI 2021 presentation, Michelle describes how she used yoga and other meditation practices to build relationships with the young people in her study and to invite them to tell their stories. Yoga helped kids speak to her and yoga helped Michelle listen to them. One of the most commonplace practices in everyday life, listening, thus became a major focus of Michelle’s research design and an area of qualitative research practice where she needed to engage in significant planning and learning.
Sheryl Chatfield’s ICQI 2021 session, linked below, provides insight into one of the most complex skills in qualitative research practice. Sheryl discuss the challenges and benefits of secondary qualitative analysis; she describes issues connected to using qualitative data collected for one study that are archived at a data repository and used for different purposes than the original research design (Chatfield, 2020, 2022). One of the most fascinating aspects of Sheryl’s presentation is how she illustrates a core issue in researcher decision-making: evaluating the possibilities for analysis of a particular data set. In her talk at ICQI 2021, Sheryl discusses three different secondary qualitative archives and the lines of investigation she and her research team produced as they engaged with this research content.
Qualitative secondary analysis is an issue for all qualitative researchers because the breadth and depth of the field would be enhanced if qualitative data could be used by multiple researchers with different research questions. As Sheryl discusses at ICQI 2021, different teams of researchers might study the Kent State shooting from alternate perspectives without asking witnesses and victims to go over the same sets of traumatic memories in live interviews. Secondary analysis is a critical design issue for beginning qualitative researchers because it is important for beginners to design their studies and anonymize their data in ways that support engagement with study materials over time, rather than over a limited period. There are people who can now no longer use the data they intended for their dissertations because life intervened, they got behind on their studies, and they lost the ability to use those data because of their IRB agreement.
In the ICQI 2021 session you can view below, Sally Campbell Galman describes how drawing data in comics may be used as a means of inquiry and communication. Comics require economy and mindfulness (Galman, 2007, 2016). As Sally explains, the researcher must reduce the big booming-confusion of a particular data set to a couple of pictures and a small number of words. Comics allow researchers to engage with their data differently from more traditional tools of qualitative data analysis, such as coding and theming. Drawing and hand-lettering research into comics requires researchers to clarify the meanings they create from their data and compress the ideas and content they communicate (Kuttner, Sousanis, & Weaver-Hightower, 2017).
In her presentation for ICQI 2021, and in her chapter for Analyzing and Interpreting Qualitative Research: After the Interview, Sally shares a three-step process for analyzing data with comics. The first step is to read “absolutely everything.” Sally prints out her transcripts, puts them in a binder, reads really hard, and memos by drawing and sketching. Words and images arise in her mind and help her tune into hot and cold spots (Peshkin, 1988) in her response to the transcripts. The second step is what Sally describes as “following the headlights” (Galman, 2022). Sally uses the words and images that have come to her mind and she has drawn in her memos “to drive closer examination of the data.” As she reads and draws in response to the printed transcripts, Sally pricks up her ears and asks herself, “What do these images say to me?” and continues to draw and memo until a shape emerges that will help her take the next step in her research process. Sally’s years of doing qualitative research have taught her to follow her senses and respond to the data without attempting to control the analysis.
The third step of analyzing data with comics is what Weaver-Hightower (2017) describes as “restorying.” In comic book research, the researcher puts the words, pictures, and ideas from the analysis back together into a comic book form. Sally ends her presentation with an example of how this process works in her research with families of transgendered children. Similar to Michelle Angelo-Rocha’s presentation, Sally takes a simple practice—in this case, drawing pictures to make sense of someone’s stories--and transforms it into a core practice of inquiry.
We hope the video of these conference presentations will interest and inspire you.
Preparing for Data Collection and Engaging in Interpretation: After the Interview: Edited Zoom Video from the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, 2021: Friday May 21, 9:00 – 10:30 CST Session # 5.21.025
Video Highlights
• 04:12 Exploring the Impacts of Meditation and Yoga Practices as Arts-Based Research Methodological Practices, Michelle Angelo-Rocha, University of South Florida.
• 18:20 After Someone Else’s Interview, Sheryl L. Chatfield, Kent State University
• 34:57 Better with Pictures, Sally Campbell Galman, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• 52:00 Discussant: Paul Mihas, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
• Chair: Charles Vanover
• Editor: Trace Taylor
References
Chatfield, S. L. (2020). Recommendations for secondary analysis of qualitative data. The Qualitative Report, 23(3), 833-842.
Chatfield, S. L. (2022). After someone else’s interview. In C. Vanover, P. Mihas, & J. Saldaña (Eds.), Analyzing and interpreting qualitative data: After the interview: SAGE.
Galman, S. C. (2007). Shane, the lone ethnographer: A beginner's guide to ethnography: Rowman Altamira.
Galman, S. C. (2016). The good, the bad, and the data: Shane the Lone Ethnographer’s basic guide to qualitative data analysis: Routledge.
Galman, S. C. (2022). Follow the headlights: On comics-based data analysis. In C. Vanover, P. Mihas, & J. Saldaña (Eds.), Analyzing and interpreting qualitative data: After the interview: SAGE.
Kuttner, P. J., Sousanis, N., & Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2017). How to draw comics the scholarly way. Handbook of arts-based research, 396-422.
Peshkin, A. (1988). In search of subjectivity—one's own. Educational Researcher, 17(7), 17-21.
Vanover, C., Mihas, P., & Saldaña, J. (Eds.). (2022). Analyzing and interpreting qualitative data: After the interview. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2017). Losing Thomas & Ella: A father’s story (a research comic). Journal of Medical Humanities, 38(3), 215-230.
This hands-on post introduces a tool you can use in the analytic stage of a qualitative study.