I should begin by starting this post that although I have booked in a date for my intended focus group, I haven’t started any kind of analysis. This post is intended to help me consider my options. I came across these terms in the participation form, so I felt it best to begin investigating the terms before I send out the form.
Type of research: Face-to-face focus group (up to 5 students, 1 hour, 4 questions plus any prompts)
Understanding your own positionality is vital in finding the most appropriate research method. As Braun and Clarke (2006: 80) state: “At this point, it is important to acknowledge our own theoretical positions and values in relation to qualitative research… What is important is that the theoretical framework and methods match what the researcher wants to know, and that they acknowledge these decisions, and recognize them as decisions.”
What is my positionality? Student-centred learning, putting the students in the driving seat, experiential learning, and cyclical learning (I am learning as much from students in the way they respond to tasks and teach each other, as they are from my teaching).
Thematic Analysis
This is a qualitative data method that involves reading through a data set – in my case, transcripts from the focus group – and identifying pattern and reading from across the data.
Identifying patterns is important, particularly in responses from students at different stages. Thematic analysis also enables involving research participants at the analysis stage – this is quite an important factor in my positionality of student-centred learning, particularly around student ownership.
Thematic analysis is flexible and good for novice researchers (such as I am!), but it could also mean the qualitative data from the focus group could be interpreted in different ways, with decisions on that is less or more important to focus on. While it would be good to see any more patterns forming across different groups, that could be considered in a second cycle of research.
Braun and Clarke (2006: 81) – ” Thematic analysis can be an essentialist or realist method, which reports experiences, meanings and the reality of participants, or it can be a constructionist method, which examines the ways in which events, realities, meanings, experiences and so on are the effects of a range of discourses operating within society.”
In this case, the society on different levels – the student community with students as individuals with individual needs, the overall society of the BA Theatre Design course, and the society of practical collaborative working.
Step 1. Transcribe data from focus group
Step 2. Create an initial set of codes (in a codebook) to represent the meanings and patterns. Identify interesting excerpts and apply codes to them.
Step 3. Collate codes with supporting data. Group the coded excerpts together.
Step 4. Group codes into potential themes (and sub-themes).
Step 5. Review and revise. Ensure each theme has enough supporting data and is distinct. How do the themes come together as a narrative?
Step 6. Write the narrative. This should contain fully thought out themes, and communicate to the readers about the validity of the research. Why was it worth researching, and what does it help to uncover? It should make an argument for the claims you present.
References:
https://delvetool.com/blog/thematicanalysis
Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), pp.77–101.
Narrative analysis
This is where researchers use narrative analysis to understand how participants construct a story and use a narrative in their responses. The data is reduced to a set of core narrative. The researcher then interprets the construction of that narrative. Narratives can be found in:
- journals
- letters
- conversations
- transcripts from interviews/focus groups
and any other narrative analysis format.
Examples of personal narratives: - Topical Stories – a restricted story about a specific moment in time e.g. Interview question “tell me about a time when you overcame an obstacle”
- Personal narrative – from a long interview or a series of long interviews that give an extended account of someone’s life
- Entire life story – constructed from observations, documents and interviews.
Semi-structured interviews allow for participants to explore narrative freedom (as opposed to heavily structured interviews which restrict the potential for narrative and any tangents that the participants want to explore).
Transcription of the interviews should not just about the face-value words, but also the interim filler words (such as ‘um’, and ‘er’), and pauses, in order to explore how the interviewee responded holistically.
Coding the responses can be deductive (finding pre-determined codes e.g. beginning, middle, end) or inductive (finding the codes as you go, with each story being a narrative block). It is possible to combine deductive and inductive coding.
References:
https://delvetool.com/blog/narrativeanalysis
https://delvetool.com/blog/deductiveinductive
Grounded Theory Analysis
Grounded theory is an inductive approach where new theories are derived from the data, as opposed to traditional hypothesis-deductive approaches of research, where you come up with a hypothesis and then try to prove/disprove it,
Grounded theory should be used when there is no existing theory that explains a phenomenon, or if there is an existing theory but the data is incomplete.
Data collection and data analysis are cyclical – data is collected more than once, and continuously analysed in a cycle. Everytime the data is collected and analysed, it becomes closer to becoming a theory.
Data collection is called ‘theoretical sampling’ – recruit a small group to begin with, and plan to recruit more at a later date. Interview people, transcribe, and begin analysis…
Step 1. Open coding – break up the transcripts into individual excerpts
Step 2. Group the excerpts together into codes.
Step 3. Go back to the field and collect more data.
Step 4. See how the new data compares to the codes collected so far. The new data may contradict the codes or give you more details on the codes that you have.
References:
Step 5. Axial coding – finding the axis that bring the codes together into categories.
Step 6. Collect more data.
Step 7. Continue to refine codes and categories even more.
Step 8. Selective coding – define one core category that ties all the different categories together. This is the basis for the final theory.
Positives:
Theories are derived directly from real-world participants in real world settings
Findings are tightly connected to the data
Theories are collected without preconceived hypothesis, allowing the data to guide you.
Negatives:
There could be difficulty in recruiting participants, especially if you are looking for new participants to recruit. You are limited by the people you can reach out to in cyclical data collection.
Data can be time consuming to collect.
Data could be difficult to track.
I like the idea of using Grounded Theory analysis in the future to build a bigger holistic picture on the same topic. The input of teachers and industry professionals will be vital in considering what, if at all, is important, in technical assessment.
https://delvetool.com/groundedtheory