DE LA CIRCULACIÓN URBANA

Before moving on to a description of the way in which the primary data was analysed, I need to explain how the data was coded. The data, of course, includes all the responses to the open-ended and closed-ended items in the interview schedule, as well as instances where the respondents answered the Likert scale of a closed-ended question, but then continued to elaborate, as well as questions and responses that evolved naturally from the interview.

Seidel (1998) says that the coding of qualitative data basically entails the acts of 1) noticing, 2) collecting and 3) thinking, but importantly explains this process as iterative and progressive, and further indicates the importance of expressing the relationship of quotes numerically (in a quantitative manner) as well as qualitatively (in a qualitative manner). Thus, I firstly found it important to use SPSS so that I could achieve the former (in Chapter 5), but also found the manual colour-coding process important, as it allowed me achieve the latter (in Chapter 6).

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3.4.3.1 Expressing responses to open-ended items quantitatively

The coding of the data firstly involved assigning case numbers to each interview. Thus, simply put, the first interview I conducted was named case 1, and the respondent became respondent 1. This resulted in the following table of interview information.

Table 3.1: Distribution of respondents across the three samples

Sample 1 Sample 2 Sample 3

Respondent 1 Respondent 3 Respondent 4

Respondent 2 Respondent 16 Respondent 9

Respondent 5 Respondent 17 Respondent 10

Respondent 6 Respondent 18 Respondent 12

Respondent 7 Respondent 19 Respondent 15

Respondent 8 Respondent 20 Respondent 23

Respondent 11 Respondent 21

Respondent 13 Respondent 24

Respondent 14 Respondent 25

Respondent 22 Respondent 26

Respondent 27

Coding essentially involves the reduction of information, in this case the data from the interview transcripts, into manageable data chunks. In my study this involved the following steps:

1. Firstly, all interviews were transcribed verbatim. As indicated earlier, all interviews were tape-recorded. This approximates a mixed-methods approach in that the interview schedule was used to capture answers to specified questions, but that, as mentioned, the interviews were conducted in a conversational manner and many questions therefore arose during the actual interview. In order to capture all this rich data it was important to tape-record the interviews and transcribe them. 2. The interview schedule was already structured according to four themes, creating

a provisional ‘start list’ of codes before starting with the fieldwork (Basit, 2003). As already explained, these four themes (biographical and personal information; perception of the impact of institutional factors on attrition; perception of the impact of societal factors on attrition; recommendations for retention of women

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doctors) were selected as categories based on previous literature and studies of women in the medical profession. Basit (2003: 145) asserts that codes can come from “the conceptual framework, list of research questions, hypotheses, problem areas and/or key variables that the researcher brings to the study”.

3. As a first sweep, I selected six interview transcripts at random, two for each sample, and categorised the various possible responses that could be elicited from each open-ended question. Thus, my coding essentially involved grouping responses into already defined themes and then, through the process of reading the responses to each open-ended question, identifying further relevant subthemes in the responses. For instance, in relation to the question asking the respondent how she felt that her marital status influenced her experience of the profession, the range of responses were grouped as 1 - Positively, 2 - Negatively, 3 - Has not influenced, 4 - Unmarried, 9 - No comment55. This is supported by Basit, who says that “category names can come from the pool of concepts that researchers already have from their disciplinary and professional reading, or borrowed from the technical literature, or are the words and phrases used by informants themselves” (2003: 144). I thus viewed my process of coding as informed by theory, but I also entered into a reflexive process by editing and reviewing themes and categories emerging from the data. For a complete view of how each question was coded, please refer to the codebook in Appendix 5. This process allowed a numerical representation of the types of responses to open-ended questions by the three samples of respondents.

3.4.3.2 Expressing responses to open-ended items qualitatively

In order to express the responses to open-ended items qualitatively, I proceeded with the following steps.

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This process of reducing qualitative data into a quantitative format involves a qualitative analysis, in which the open-ended responses are coded on the basis of the general theme of the response to the relevant item.

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1. I read through the transcripts manually56, colour coding and arranging quotes for use in my analysis. I read and reread the entire interview transcripts and highlighted the relevant quotes that would be useful to illustrate themes and debates already identified in the literature, but that were grouped under the four themes or sections as in the interview schedule (Biographical and personal information - Black, Impact of institutional factors - Green, Impact of societal factors - Red, Recommendations on retention - Blue).

2. Lastly, after chunks of data were organised under these four themes, I further divided the quotes relating to each theme into those that were constitutive and those that were illustrative (Mason, 2002) of the phenomenon I was asking about. Essentially, I chose for inclusion in my analysis those “textual data [that] illuminate questions of importance to social science” (Ryan & Bernard, 2010: 4). In my case, I was interested in ascertaining whether these data chunks indicated the presence/absence of a gendered organisation of medicine (referred to by Rao et al (1999) as the “deep structure”). I made use of Spradley’s suggestion to search transcripts “for evidence of social conflict, cultural contradictions, informal methods of social control, things that people do in managing impersonal social relationships. Methods by which people acquire and maintain achieved and ascribed status, and information about how people solve problems” (1979: 199).