‘Seeking the theory – Revealing the obvious, the implicit, the unrecognised and the unknown’ (Morse, 1994:32)
Introduction
The proposal by Morse, above, that all I wanted to discover would be revealed by going through the process of grounded theory made something which I found quite complicated, to appear quite simple. As a researcher I had amassed, literally, vast quantities of information from my interviewees and my task was to sort the data into categories and thence into a theoretical framework which I believed would answer some of the questions about drop out in ABE.
As I have said, I really had no clear idea about using grounded theory method until I started to use it, but I found it a systematic process that suited me and was suitable for the purpose of my research, since my in-depth interviews yielded information which very soon indicated conditions in my interviewees’ lives in which they had felt alienation.
In this Chapter, I describe and discuss my process of putting grounded theory into practice and report the various stages involved in my data analysis, at the end of which I hoped to develop a theory which explained the phenomena I was researching. The Chapter also shows how I reached towards my theory, through the analysis of the data and thus indicates my findings, which are discussed in detail in Chapter 5. As I was working my way through this process, it seemed sensible to take examples from the data given to me by the interviewees, to illustrate the steps necessary in coding and categorising in grounded theory. Thus, the reader gets a taste of the emerging findings, presented more comprehensively in the next Chapter, 5.
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I first recorded the interviews and then typed them back and as I have said, this initial process ensured my immersion in the lives and especially the feelings of my interviewees, and prompted me to label the data accordingly. It was so clear that they had become involved in ABE with high hopes of a positive outcome, but that these hopes were dashed, sometimes because they had not been articulated clearly, sometimes because the structure or content of the provision was inimical.
They described disconnect between what they had hoped to achieve in ABE and what they actually achieved and that this disconnect led them to feel different from the other, apparently successful students in ABE. From their individual stories I was able to glean that on various other occasions during their lives they had also felt different, sometimes at home, sometimes at school. Listening to their individual stories, I was also able to hear the enjoyment and fulfilment as they described how they felt when they belonged, or were supported, in work or in their relationship with their families and children. I came to believe that their hopes would have been more likely to have been fulfilled if they had felt involved in the education system and that the theory I was searching for to explain their not persisting in ABE would lie in their need to belong.
Throughout the chapter I have given quite in-depth descriptions of the analytic process, because I believe that each use of grounded theory differs in some ways from others, that grounded theory is a framework, not a concrete plan, so long as it meets the criteria mentioned in the previous chapter, and I felt it necessary to show how my data collection, coding and theoretical analysis fit into the framework. I have to say, also, that I actually found using grounded theory to be extremely enlightening, and I wanted to share the enlightenment. I found grounded theory to be systematic, on a step by step basis I worked my way through the process and am pleased that as the findings emerged they were absolutely grounded in the words and described lives of the interviewees.
To briefly describe my analytic process, it started with coding the information gleaned in the interviews. As I compared the data bits across the various interviews and conditions, I was able to narrow the focus, gathering the codes into axial codes, connecting them and placing them in categories, thence into major categories and subsequently arriving at a core category. At this point I was able to deduce that
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tension between the major categories, Self-Concept and Social Context was the root cause of drop out for these learners.
I had read many studies e.g. Charmaz (1990), Ryan (2010), Casey (2009),Roderick (2010), Seel (2006), Ravindran (2013), Hutchinson (1990) and others using the grounded theory approach, hoping for affirmation of my methodology, but discovered that each grounded theory seems to be unique, despite there being templates, examples and worked studies. Quoting Urquhart (2001:2) ‘each researcher has to find his or her own way with regard to their particular analysis’.
Having decided to use, for what I thought were good reasons, long, relatively unstructured interviews, in the interest of obtaining real life data from my participants, the actual enormity of the volume of information gathered I found to be quite inhibiting. It was necessary, therefore to put some sort of structure on my investigation to get myself motivated to analyse the information which had been generated.
Of course, I understand that as this is a constructive process and that I have to take responsibility for interpreting the interview. Belenky (1997:137) suggests that ‘all knowledge is constructed, and the knower is an intimate part of the known’. As Bowers (2009:238) says ‘I think one of the places we are all moving toward is a greater recognition of the role played by the researcher and the context’
From my perspective, ‘construction’ came on a number of different levels, firstly, my understanding of the interviews, then the construction of my labels for the data from my interviewees, sorting them into categories, and thereafter the construction of my theory. Although I felt that the codes with which I labelled the data were a clear understanding of what I had been told by my interviewees, the construction of the theory was far from easy and required vast amounts of time, thought, mind maps and paper.
In analysis, it is really important not to see oneself as ‘an expert’ who will magically attribute meaning, but to allow the interviewee to speak for herself, what Best (1995) describes as prioritising the representation over the represented. I found it important, as I have said elsewhere, to use memos to reflect on the process, after interviews, during the coding process and as I was working towards the theoretical framework. Morse (1994) notes that if one is working in an area, then it is
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extremely difficult to research it dispassionately and Etherington (2004:209) suggests there is potential danger in researching a topic ‘about which we are passionate’ and I found that by writing up memos when my own feelings came up during analysis, that I was able to be more objective. In a very practical sense, Morse (1994) recommends the value in keeping descriptive notes separate from evaluative and I found this relatively simple to do, labelling them differently in MAXQDA.
Coding
Within grounded theory, the process of analysis begins with coding. Charmaz (2006) tells that coding ‘is the first step in moving beyond concrete statements in the data to making analytic interpretations’ (p.43). She says that the process of coding will include taking data apart, labelling it and getting some sense in which it might assist developing abstract ideas. I have to say that, as I approached the coding process I had absolutely no knowledge of how this might happen. This must, of course, be the experience of any neophyte in grounded theory.
Grounded theory coding generates the bones of your analysis, Theoretical Integration will assemble these bones into a working skeleton (Charmaz 2006:45)
In coding you are, essentially, looking at each individual segment of data and attaching a label – not applying a pre-existing label, because we are actively naming our data. Kelle (2007) describes what he sees as the most basic difficulty, the need to let categories ‘emerge’ while all the time having previous theoretical knowledge.
Following directions from Charmaz (2006), it is necessary to keep in mind what the data is about, what suggestions it makes and from whose point of view. Looking at data from this perspective may indicate a label (a code) for it. In actually doing this, one has to remain open and close to the data, move quickly through it, to have simple, short codes which precisely name a segment of the data and in this way to compare data with data. (p.49)
I coded the first interview which I conducted, with Alice. Following Charmaz’s instructions, I sought to find and name meaning in the text while acknowledging that this meaning is a construction between the interviewee and interviewer. As Ryan (2006: 96) says ‘all the data is filtered through you’.
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After this, very early coding, I looked for consistency and themes, or categories, in the story that she was telling, and also for inconsistencies, and noted them in memos on MAXQDA, as I have said. Charmaz also says (p.51) that the ‘logic of discovery becomes clear as you code line by line – you have to look at the data anew.’ I am not so certain about this – it took several ‘lookings’ at the data anew for me to gain any clarity or get a handle on what I was doing.
The coding process
Charmaz (2006) describes initial coding as helping the researcher to look at categories and see processes, whereas line by line coding facilitates a sense of objectivity and frees you to question the data under consideration. She pursues the process of coding by suggesting that ‘line by line’ coding is important, particularly for ‘early, in depth, interview data’ as it enables you to get a close look at what participants say and have concerns about. I found that this process enabled me to get a little separate from the data, and assisted an objective view of the phenomena, as Ryan (2006) says, ‘making the familiar strange (p.95) and enabling the researcher to ‘reveal a certain essence of the data’, which will enable you to answer your research questions. However, contrary to Charmaz (2006) who found the process
‘quite simple’, I found it to be quite difficult.
Nonetheless, through coding line by line, one does get a sense of what data to collect next, and I think that this is the crucial difference between GT and other qualitative systems, that one works from one set of data to another. Kelle (2007) describes in very simple terms how he assigns data to categories, watches sub-categories emerge, creates sub-categories of a given category and looks to see any relationship with other categories, thereby linking them together to form a theoretical framework.
My process, therefore, was to interview, to write up the texts of the interviews, to read them over for broad themes and to code them. Each successive interview brought up themes and happenings which could be teased out in subsequent interviews, and indeed looked for in the reporting of earlier interviews. It was interesting to discover, for instance, when talking about early schooling that some interviewees had extremely negative experience which they handled by being ‘very quiet’, some were put on the ‘bad’ bench and some had positive experiences and only fell out of the system at a much later date. Thus the category ‘experiencing school’
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had a number of dimensions. Looking at these dimensions, for instance, I found that my interviewees’ own early school experience frequently impacted on how they behaved as parents of young children in school. For example, Bernie’s mother, in particular was violently antipathetic to her participation in education, whereas Bernie, recognising the importance of supporting her children says ‘when I see what I done for my children, the encouragement I give mine’.
Charmaz (2006) says that coding full interview transcripts gives ‘ideas and understandings that you otherwise miss’ (p.70), bringing a deeper level of understanding. She also says that the first coding might not necessarily be the last one, and in my case this was absolutely true. I used gerunds, trying always to name actions, not persons, as suggested by Charmaz (2006), quoting instructions from Glazer (1978). Thus, ‘It was that I couldn’t fit into it, Mary’ was coded as ‘feeling excluded’, rather than ‘exclusion’, since I was trying to describe precisely what Alice had said. It begs the question, of course, about whether or not it should have been
‘being excluded’; since Alice did not exclude herself, but felt that school had excluded her. She describes this feeling very strongly even after a long number of years.
Following this piece of work, I approached John’s text and dealt with it in a similar way, looking carefully at the text and coding it, but thereafter putting the texts side by side, looking for similarities and differences and consistency and inconsistency between them. I found it useful using MAXQDA in this process, because I was able to keep both texts on my computer screen at the same time. I would disagree with Ryan (2006) in this regard, because I found having the texts on my screen during the whole coding and analysis process to be very useful. Whenever I wanted to ask a question of the data, it was readily to hand.
As I have said, I was simultaneously coding earlier interviews and conducting newer, so this meant that I could raise topics that appeared important in the earlier interviews for discussion with the later interviewees. Charmaz (2006:51) says that close study of the data will ‘spark new ideas for you to pursue’. I took very great care, however, not to drive the later interviews in a direction suggested by earlier, since I felt that this would be forcing the information. For example, if, in my post-interview review, I noted a topic that I thought to be important, then I raised it at the next interview, but during the process, not at the beginning, and with no particular
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emphasis. If the second interviewee did not have anything to say about the topic, then I let it rest for that interview and raised it in the same way in subsequent interviews. In exploring the subject of ‘experiencing school’ raised above, for example, I gained some very good information about the development of later interviewees’ beliefs and feelings about education.
Comparison
The first stage in coding was to read through the text and highlight in different colours what I labelled ‘situations’. Because of the way in which I structured the interviews, covering the same life situations in approximately the same order, I quickly became aware that all of the people I interviewed had had difficulties, not just with ABE, but with their earlier education and, indeed in their interface with their families and their families’ experiences.
I subsequently discovered that what I called ‘situations’, Charmaz (2006) citing Strauss & Corbin (1990) calls conditions – ‘the circumstances or situations that form the structure of the studied phenomena’. From the first reading of the first interview (with Alice) she described being isolated within her family, within society, within school, within second chance education. I therefore considered that, for her
‘isolation’ was a serious consideration, within the conditions mentioned above. I then went to the second interview, with John, and found that he had a similar experience.
I was therefore making comparisons between codes which I had applied within and between interviews. According to Strauss and Corbin(1998) the ‘art of comparison’
is about the interplay between the data and the researcher. However, Boeije (2002) states that there is more at play here than ‘just comparing everything that crosses the researcher’s path’(p.394) and stresses the importance of what she calls the
‘production procedure’ which takes place at the data analysis stage, in judging the value of a study. Quoting Tesch (1990:90) she describes the importance of comparison, thus:
The main intellectual tool is comparison. The method of comparing and contrasting is used for practically all intellectual tasks during analysis, forming categories, establishing the boundaries of the categories, assigning the segments to categories, summarising the content of each category, finding negative evidence, etc., The goal is to discern conceptual
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similarities, to refine the discriminative power of categories and to discover patterns.
Boeije (2002) further describes what she calls ‘a purposeful approach’ to comparison –a sort of route map of the ‘production procedure’ a tool I found to be very useful in working my way through the logjam of codes in which I found myself and towards categories. However, I had to get my mind around what should not be compared, and how I could decide what was important, what less important. As Dey (1993:46) says ‘classification cannot be neutral – it is always classification for a purpose’. This of course, underlines the constructed nature of grounded theory, where the researcher investigates the data and reaches conclusions, or constructions about why the actors perform in certain ways.
Boeije, (2002) demonstrates the process that she went through in studying couples, one of whom had multiple sclerosis, by using grounded theory. In her example, too, interviews provided the texts for analysis ‘to make sense of the data and reconstruct the perspectives of the groups being studied’. This is done by ‘fragmenting and connecting’ both actions being necessary for the process, to keep each other in
‘equilibrium’. She sees that fragmenting ‘lifts the coded pieces out of the context of the interview as a whole’, whereas connecting ‘accentuates the context and richness of the data, as the interview parts were interpreted as a whole’. In analysing text, the codes attached to fragments can make sense of what she calls the ‘core message of the interview’ and to ‘interpret the parts of the interview in the context of the entire story as it has been told to us by the interviewee’. (p.395)
Boeije (2002) included a Table 1 with her article10, and I used the first two stages of her process, since I had comparisons only within and between one series of interviewees. These questions systematise the process of axial coding ‘searching for indicators and characteristics of each concept, in order to define the concept’ (p.398) Looking at a single interview she asks the questions ‘What is the core message?, is it consistent?, which codes should be used? What are the relationships between the fragments? Without actually using the matrix she produced, I found this process to be very useful when I was looking at text of an interview and trying to get a sense of what the interviewee was actually saying about conditions they described.
10 Appendix2, p.248
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At Stage 2, - making comparisons between interviews - she asks about similarities and differences between interviews and whether or not interviewees are actually talking about the same situations and what information they actually give about a category. She also asks what combinations of codes occur and what construction can be put on them – defining the constructed nature of her approach.
The answers to these questions, she says, will develop categories and label them with the ‘most appropriate codes’, but also help to note inconsistencies. ‘It represents an attempt to interpret the parts of the interview in the context of the entire story’.
(p.395)
In an example of my application of this process, I examined Len’s interview. I found
In an example of my application of this process, I examined Len’s interview. I found