Tipología

Bogdan and Biklen (1998) define qualitative data analysis as “working with the data, organizing them, breaking them into manageable units, coding them, synthesizing them, and searching for patterns”. The aim of data analysis is to discover patterns, concepts, themes, and meanings. In case study research, Yin (2003) discusses the need for searching the data for “patterns”, which may explain or identify causal links in the database. In the process, the researcher concentrates on the whole data first, then attempts to take it apart and re-constructs it again more meaningfully.

According to Hammersley and Atkinson (2007), the first step in the process of analyzing ethnographic data involves careful reading of data in order to get familiar with it. I organized my data in a systematic way and made it easy to be traced back to its original context. I listened to the tapes several times then read and re-read the transcripts, then proceeded to write memos, comments, and summaries to become familiar with the data before starting formal analysis. I organized my data in three

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phases, so that each phase led me to the next phase easily, resulting in detailed data analysis approach.

4.6.1 Data analysis process

The datasets that have been analyzed include: audio recordings and transcripts of the ethnographic interviews, observation field notes, and documents.

According to Miles and Huberman (1994), researchers generally have some ideas of what would feature in the study or may have some ideas of what to look for even if such ideas may change over time, hence the need to formulate the final conceptual framework to include all the themes that emerge from the data analysis. As stated previously, this research is placed within the constructivist approach which assumes that the meaning of experiences and events are constructed by individuals, and therefore people construct the realities in which they participate (Charmaz, 2006).

From this stance, research aims to elicit and understand how research participants construct their individual and shared meanings around the phenomenon of interest. Also particular to constructivism is a similar construction of meaning by researchers that “their interpretation of the studied phenomenon is itself a construction” (Charmaz, 2006: 187).

The data I gathered from the participants were based on expectations and experience which I investigated against reality. The role of context was also important as this offered important information which gave me clues about the reality. This approach relies on ‘bottom up’ processing; I analysed various forms of

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data such as texts, notes, photos and documents. I was looking for relationships and patterns to construct knowledge from the data. In addition, I used ‘top-down’ processing as I analysed the ‘big picture’ which is understanding dyslexia from a high level view, I used Frith’s framework as my theoretical framework which guided me to gain more understanding of the different views of SpLD from literature review and enabled me to link the literature review with the data gathered from the two primary schools involved in this study.

Themes and subthemes were essentially generated from the recurring ideas in the data set (Bryman and Bell, 2011). The thematic analysis enabled me to associate and analyse the frequency of themes from the data set.

There are several reasons for adopting such an approach. Research is often bounded by constraints of time and resources, and analysis has to be brought to a close when specific questions have been answered; this approach is suited to asking specific questions with limited timescales, especially with a single researcher conducting a doctoral research. Another reason is that although this analysis is mainly inductive, it allows for the inclusion of a priori as well as emergent concepts in coding (Bryman and Bell, 2011; Clarke and Braun, 2013). I had a priori concepts, from existing literature and document analysis (biological, cognitive, and behavioural), which I wished to use as codes in addition to codes developed from other emergent themes such as inclusive education and awareness of SpLD.

119 4.6.1.1 Familiarisation

The tape-recorded interviews were transcribed into text as soon as possible after every interview. The transcriptions were written in a word file. When I was writing up field notes, transcribing recorded interviews, or filing documents that I gathered from the site, I jotted down any preliminary words or phrases for codes on the notes, transcripts, and documents. The transcripts were read several times to identify new themes and categories. This process was used to develop categories, which were then conceptualized into broad themes

The data have been organized in a systematic way and any unit of text can be traced back to its original context. I have listened to tapes; read and re-read the data, and made memos and summaries to get familiar with the data before starting formal analysis.

4.6.1.2 Identification of a thematic framework

The identification of a thematic framework was the initial coding framework, which developed from the interview questions and the initial themes (biological, cognitive and behavioral) and from emerging issues during the data familiarisation stage; an example of one of the environmental sub-themes is discussed in Figure 6 below. This thematic framework was developed and refined during subsequent stages through re-coding to develop better-defined categories. The theme of knowledge and beliefs about dyslexia was drawn from the literature review and the data, which indicated different perspectives for understanding dyslexia: biological, cognitive and behavioural. The theme of policy and provision was drawn from both the literature and the field data. The theme of teachers’ and parents’ awareness was

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drawn from the literature and the interview data generated by mothers and classroom teachers. The theme of students’ and teachers’ difficulties was also drawn from the literature review and the field data.

I chose Frith’s model for the analysis of my data in order to investigate the perspectives of the different groups of participants and the relationship between them. I have discussed this theoretical framework in an earlier chapter, in which I explain that the model shows dyslexia to be considered in terms of the brain or biology anomalies, and the contribution of genetics; in terms of cognition, that is, the thinking process; and in terms of behaviour, that is, as a result of the difficulties they experience in acquiring skills in reading, writing and spelling. See Figure 6 for more explanation.

121 4.6.1.3 Indexing

Having identified the thematic framework for the study, the process began of applying that framework to the data, using codes to identify specific pieces of data corresponding to the themes. I searched the data for material that could be coded under this framework while concurrently searching for emergent concepts. The preliminary codes such as knowledge and beliefs about SpLD, schools’ policy and provision and classroom practice, used at this stage, were modified later but served to begin the process of categorizing and analysing.

4.6.1.4 Charting

This process began by using headings from interview questions to create tables of my data so that I could read across the dataset. These tables could be thematic for each theme across all respondents (cases) or by case for each respondent across all themes. Table 3 below shows an example of how data can be tracked.