Modificación de la Ley 9/2013, de 3 de diciembre, de Pesca de Castilla y

Content Analysis was used as one element of the literature review in Chapter 3 to provide a lens through which to interpret and make explicit how DES Inspectors think early years pedagogical practice should be constructed, framed and enacted in multigrade schools. In using Content Analysis, my assumption was that it is particularly appropriate for analysis of the WSE and WSE-MLL documents because it allows a detailed investigation of the relationship of language to other social processes and how language works within power relations (Taylor, 2004).

Twelve reports all published during the academic year 2013-2014 were included. The choice of reports aimed to include a similar range of schools to those chosen for the research study itself. These were two and three teacher schools which had pupil numbers between 17 and 66 and which were located in various geographical locations nationwide. The selections included some WSE reports and some WSE- MLL reports. Two main types of information were included in the reports, namely,

scalar evaluations about levels of quality and qualitative judgements which related to the intrinsic nature of educational events at these schools.

In the Inspectors’ reports I was guided by Fairclough’s (2010, p. 94) three dimensional framework in which each discursive event has three dimensions: it is a ‘spoken or written language text, it is an instance of discourse practice involving the production and interpretation of a text, and it is a piece of social practice’. The first level of analysis necessitates micro-dissection of the text for linguistic nuances that contributed to the construction of meaning. Fairclough (2010, p. 133) refers to the second level of his analytical triad as ‘discourse practice’ and ‘interpretation’. At this level there is an awareness of the socially produced nature of language and that documents such as WSE and WSE-MLL reports are always imbued with the world of their producers. The third level of Content Analysis is referred to as that of ‘sociocultural practice or social analysis’ (Fairclough, 2010, p. 133). This is the analytical space of how texts play out in ‘situational, institutional and societal spaces’. It is the enacted world of the report or the space of action and interaction where the micro worlds of text production play out in the everyday world and lives of social actors.

Analysis of quantitative data

The analysis of quantitative data followed a process involving the following stages: data preparation; initial exploration of the data; analysis of the data; presentation and display of the data. The primary task of data preparation was coding and each answer in the questionnaire was assigned a code number. The codes were entered into an Excel spreadsheet and then imported into the statistical analysis software SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Scientists).The reason for using two different software packages was that Excel would automatically update graphs showing the frequencies of responses as survey data was entered which gave early impressions and ideas about the data and helped in reflecting on findings at a beginning stages.

Descriptive statistics were used to form the basis of the quantitative analysis of data. Descriptive analysis of the data enabled a rigorous organisation of data, summarizing the findings and displaying the evidence. Distributions for the data were presented as frequency counts for each interval point of the measure and were summarised in terms of the range of scores from the lowest to the highest. The

statistical package SPSS was used as a means of presenting data on frequencies with which I was able to design tables and histograms.

For the open-ended questions in the questionnaire respondents supplied answers which then had to be grouped into workable categories for thematic analysis. A coding frame was devised by taking a random sample (10%, n=15) of the questionnaires and generating a frequency tally of the range of responses as preliminary to coding classification. Having devised the coding frame, a check was made on validity by using it to code up a further sample (10%, n=15) of the questionnaires. The coding frame was then applied to the remainder of the questionnaires.

Analysis of qualitative data

Analysis of the data took place in two phases. For the first phase, Miles and Huberman (1994) provided the general framework for qualitative data analysis which was adopted as it is particularly useful in case studies (Robson, 2002). The analysis consisted of three concurrent ‘flows of activity’: data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing/verification. These processes formed a continuous iterative process ensuring high quality accessible data as well as documentation of what analysis has been carried out.

With data reduction, the whole data set was made more manageable by summarising, coding and writing memos. Miles and Huberman (1994) argue that this is analysis because already decisions are being made about what is to be included and what is to be left out. Data display is an organised, compressed assembly of information that facilitated thinking and conclusion drawing. Finally, according to Miles and Huberman (1994) conclusions are drawn and verified by testing their reliability and validity. Three questions were helpful in this process:

Is an explanation plausible?

Can you find evidence to confirm it?

Can a finding be replicated in another data set?

Qualitative data sets consisted of interview transcripts (with children, parents and teachers) and written records of observations. The general approach to data analysis with regard to interviews was similar in that it was a recursive process which began during data collection. Initially, analysis consisted of reading and annotating

transcript data and identifying key themes emerging from the data. The data was categorized into broad analytic themes based on the research questions and recurring themes in the evidence. The various data bases were scrutinized for extracts that conformed to and contradicted analytic themes (Miles and Huberman, 1994) while a ‘constant comparisons’ approach (Silverman, 2000) was applied to further refine research findings presented in Chapter 5.

The second phase of data analysis focussed on the constant comparative method of data analysis as a means of evolving grounded theory (Merriman, 2009). In the quote below Strauss and Corbin (1998) encapsulate the usefulness of grounded theory approach in providing a means of further refinement that was needed in the approach to data analysis in this mixed methods study

‘If someone wanted to know whether one drug is more effective than another, then a double blind clinical trial would be more appropriate than grounded theory study. However, if someone wanted to know what it was like to be a participant in a drug study [..], then he or she might sensibly engage in a grounded theory project or some other type of qualitative study.’

(Strauss and Corbin, 1998, p. 40).

Grounded theory thus provided an additional scaffold for qualitative data analysis and for the development of findings as outlined in Chapter 6.

To enable the development of a grounded theory, two further coding techniques were used to examine data: open or line-by-line coding, which provided an initial departure point in identifying phenomena of importance to participants in the multigrade classroom; and axial coding, described by Charmaz (2006) as reassembling the data that has already been broken up into separate codes by open coding. Charmaz (2006) recommends a less rigid approach as favoured in this study of reflecting on categories, sub categories and establishing connections to make sense of qualitative and the quantitative data. The process involved a form of pattern recognition within the qualitative and quantitative data sets, pulling together data into more abstract categories which became the building blocks for emerging theoretical propositions.

Themes were generated which encompassed a number of categories and these themes were then applied across the different types of data gathered in the study. Coding of data across the interview scripts, observation field notes, open sections of the teacher questionnaires and the content analysis of the WSE and WSE-MLL reports was processed to identify the extent to which categories and themes emerged.

Some codes were then recognised as sharing similar characteristics and provided a start list of codes which provided categories for organising data into meaningful clusters in the thematic analysis.