Assignment 3 Data Analysis

Assignment 3 Data Analysis

 The mere recording of data is not important unless you connect it with some larger idea.

At critical points during the research process, you will need to take time to reflect on the data in your research portfolio—to look at your observation and interview notes—reflect on what you’ve learned so far and begin to analyze and synthesize the data that are most important to your work. You need to read and reread and reread your data looking for recurring themes, meanings, images, metaphors across your data and see if they form patterns. These patterns will help you develop theories (—or form interpretations). Theory may sound like a scary word or a word that belongs only to physics. But theory, in reality, is a continuous, unconscious part of everyday life. In the following excerpt titled “School Dance and Theory,” Graves, an anthropologist, offers the metaphor of school dance to show us how developing theories should be part of your research process.

I think doing research is like chaperoning an eighth grade dance. You can’t wait to see which ungainly guy is going to dance with which ungainly girl. You have all those ideas and theories bouncing around like so many ungainly adolescents. So, you experiment by pairing them up. That’s where the writing comes in. You put two ideas on the page, right next to each other, and see if they dance. It’s a bit herky-jerky at first but then they get a bit smoother as you work and rework them. It’s exciting. When students do research they aren’t going to know anything until they write. They say, “I can’t write yet; I don’t have an idea.” Of course, it’s the theories that save time. You know a little better who to send out together on the dance floor.

In your research portfolio, you now have material from different sources:

• interview and observation notes
• notes from outside sources (books, journals, & articles)
• artifacts

Remember, however, that gathering pages and pages of information won’t help you unless you take the time to reread them and reflect about what they mean—to you, to your research site, and to your participants. The following questions can help you select the data that are most important to your work (and give you a feeling of control over the research material that you have collected):

• Which of your participants’ words explain larger ideas about the subculture you are studying?
• What information (that comes from your Web and library research) confirms your initial hunches/impressions?
• What artifacts speak about your research site and your participants?

As you collect observation / interview notes and information from secondary sources, data will accumulate quickly. Try writing one- or two-line summaries on stick-on notes explaining what is important about certain pieces and then affix them to your data. Stick-on notes are particularly useful tools because their small size forces you to write brief summaries and they are easy to replace as your insights change over the course of your project. Once you have your material captioned with a stick-on note, you can lay out your data to see what kinds of larger themes emerge.

Sample Research Project: “Truckers’ Second Home”

Rick, a first-year writing student, wrote about truckers and the trucking culture. He spent two Fridays at a truck stop and collected an interesting range of interviews from both truckers and employees at the truck stop. He gathered many occupational stories by inviting his participants both to brag and to complain about their jobs. During his research, Rick became sensitized to truckers’ musical tastes, cravings for home-cooked food, and their ways of passing time at the truck stop. To represent those features of the trucking culture, he collected CDs of particular songs, menus from the diner, trucking magazines, and pictures of the pinball machines at the truck stop.

In the process, he also read articles and books about trucking culture. Outside sources from other writers gave him an interesting image—the image of the trucker as cowboy. And he was able to link his own findings with those sources that present a connection between truckers and cowboys.

The comparison between truckers and cowboys was something that surprised and attracted Rick at the beginning, but later he found out that it was a metaphor that did not reflect the realities of the trucking culture. Rick was particularly disturbed to find out how political the trucking industry actually is and how truckers face many of the same kinds of constraints in their work as office workers do—something which does not match the metaphor of “the open road”—another metaphor his outside sources gave him.

So “truckers as cowboys” did not become the central metaphor in Rick’s paper. Remember that his big question, like your big questions, was whether truckers form a community with shared interests, values, and language. His analysis led toward his initial hunch that the truck stop is a kind of community and a subculture for many of the truckers who spend time there. One of the truck stop employees claims that the place is like the truckers’ second home—a home away from home—and that provides the central metaphor for Rick’s paper.

 Sample Research Project: “Bingo Community”

The following is an excerpt from a student’s initial notes:

I’m intrigued by the superstitions that surface at bingo games. Although I am not particularly superstitious, I find myself rubbing my neighbor’s winnings or coding a particular game by marking an edge with the dabber, hoping that the game will bring me luck. There are mostly women at the games, and usually there is a mix of ages, although the majority is probably over 50. The men seem to accompany the women, not vice versa. Ever since I was a young girl, I have accompanied my mother and her friends to bingo games at various Catholic churches and volunteer fire stations in Western New York. Until now, however, I never took notes on what people around me were doing at these games. There’s also an underlying feeling of camaraderie in this group that doesn’t seem directly related to bingo. But maybe it is.

It was not until Holly reread her notes that she realized there were four significant themes that she could pursue as she continued the project. The process of rereading enabled her to write the following analysis on a stick-on note: “The bingo dabber is only one of the rituals I need to keep track of. I know that there are many others.” Another note says, “Gender: I counted so many more women than men. My experience tells me this is representative.” Another says, “Superstitions: bingo is a game of chance and people have their lucky charms.” And another caption is a big question mark, which alerted her mind to a theme that later became the central point: Sense of community.