Anatomía del golpe de Revés en Tenis de Campo

“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an ant heap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”

Similar to Miles and Huberman (1994), Dey (1993) suggests that the primary task of data analysis in qualitative studies is to identify and link categories. The analysis stage is a process of resolving data into its constituent components to reveal their characteristic themes and patterns. The author deconstructs qualitative data analysis into three related processes:

• Describing • Classifying

• Connecting

In Dey’s model, the analysis must first offer thorough and comprehensive descriptions that include (where appropriate) the context of action, the intentions of the social actor, and the processes in which social action is embedded. Dey (1993) suggests that data should be classified in order to “give meaning”, referring to categorisation of data and the assigning of data bits into themes and codes. Finally, with connecting, Dey suggests that categorisation or coded data can be analysed in terms of the patterns and connections that emerge. This is where the pieces are put back together again. In Dey’s terms (1993, p.47), “connecting concepts is the analytic equivalent of putting mortar between building blocks”. Like Miles and Huberman (1994), Dey (1993) defines the analysis of qualitative data in terms of clear, distinct, and identifiable sub-processes.

Tesch (1990) identifies several key characteristics of qualitative data analysis that can be viewed as commonalties of the analytical process. She cautions that no characteristics are common to all types of qualitative analysis, but suggests that there are a number of regular features.

These regular characteristics, according to Tesch (1990), are: • Analysis is a cyclical process and a reflective activity.

• The analytic process should be comprehensive and systematic, but not rigid. • The data is to be segmented and divided into meaningful units.

• Though it is segmented, a connection to the whole should be maintained. • Data is to be organised according to a system derived from the data itself. • Analysis is, on the whole, an inductive, data-led activity.

Tesch (1990) also points to the flexibility of analysis in qualitative methods, and to the absence of rules as to how it should best be done. According to Tesch, analysis implies being “artful and playful”.

Tesch maintains that this does not mean that analysis is a structureless process, nor that it should be done without sufficient attention or sloppily. Qualitative data analysis requires methodological knowledge and intellectual competence. Analysis is not about adhering to any one correct approach or set of right techniques; it is imaginative, artful, flexible, and reflexive, while being methodical, scholarly, and intellectually rigorous.

Wolcott’s (1994) description of what analysis means, presents a rather different way of thinking about how we explore and interpret qualitative data. Wolcott uses the term

“transformation” to describe a variety of strategies. He restricts the term “analysis” to a more specialised meaning than do other writers. Wolcott (1994) argues that qualitative data can be transformed in different ways and to different ends. He also breaks up the process into three types:

• Description

• Analysis

• Interpretation

Description follows from an underlying assumption that data should speak for itself. The analytical account of data should stay as close to the data as it was originally recorded. Wolcott suggests that the question here is “What is going on?”. He does recognise that there is no such thing as pure description, as it takes a human observer to accomplish description. Nevertheless, the goal of description in Wolcott’s terms is to tell a story of the data in as descriptive a way as possible.

According to Wolcott (1994), analysis is the process by which the researcher expands and extends data beyond a descriptive account. The analysis activity is also structured, formal, bounded, systematic, grounded, methodical, particular, carefully documented, and impassive. The emphasis is on the search for themes and patterns from the data. Analysis involves systematic procedures to identify essential features and relationships.

In this transformation of qualitative data, Wolcott (1994) is of the view that the researcher should attempt to offer his or her own interpretation of what is going on. In contrast to ‘analysis’ in Wolcott’s terms, ‘interpretation’ is freewheeling, casual, unbounded, aesthetically satisfying, idealistic, generative, and impassioned.

Wolcott’s triad of approaches to the analysis or transformation of qualitative data at first glance appears similar to the sets of procedures offered by Miles and Huberman (1994) and by Dey (1993). Unlike these authors, however, Wolcott does not envisage that description, analysis, and interpretation necessarily will be part of one overall schema, to be applied in its totality in all cases.

Wolcott (1994) also does not see description, analysis, and interpretation as being mutually exclusive. The transformation of qualitative data can be done at any of the three levels, or in some combination of them. He argues that description, analysis, and interpretation are the three primary ingredients of qualitative research, from which different balances can be struck.

Where appropriate, this research has adopted a descriptive approach to assist the reader in understanding the background to the crisis that the business under review experienced, and the strategy that the owner or manager of the business used to address the crisis.