TRÁMITE Y DESPACHO DE CORRESPONDENCIA

The focus of the research required an exploratory, predominantly inductive approach to examining the collected data. I was already familiar with the data in journals from Groups A and B – having read them and discussed them with students through the teaching process – so although I had some loosely formed thoughts at that stage about how students had used them for their value development, I sought to hold these ideas lightly so as not to unduly influence the analysis process. However, in reality, having structured the modules and teaching and learning strategies based on my knowledge of values development through the principles and practices of informal education, I also drew on deductive approaches at times, relating the data to existing theories to make sense of the findings.

Both the interviews and journals produced extremely rich and sometimes very personal data. With 18 interviews, 60 Advocacy learning journals and 48 Informal Education reflective journals, totalling over 290,000 words from Group B alone, with a further 210 Advocacy journals and 96 Informal Education journals from the adjacent cohorts, I decided to focus my attention on data from Group B, and have used Advocacy journal material from Groups A and C to support or offer a counterpoint to the experiences of Group B participants where significant.

The eighteen interviews were transcribed at each stage. I both read and listened to the interviews a number of times to familiarise myself with them, organising the data in various ways as I did this, to find the most helpful way of ‘reading’ and understanding it. Initially, I read each interview at each stage as they were transcribed, making general notes on each interview. Then, when I had completed the interviews, I re-organised the data by interview stage and key theme – for example reading all of the students’ answers about personal values at Stage 1, then Stage 2, then Stage 3 to explore concepts and developments, and then moving on to youth work values, and so on. This approach was somewhat challenging as students often drew on or included material in one key theme that was also relevant to another key theme, demonstrating the complex and interconnected nature of personal and professional values and their influence on practice; for example students often spoke about their personal values in relation to their work with young people, also giving information about their thinking on youth work values and drawing on examples from their youth work practice to illustrate these, thereby providing data relevant to the questions about youth work values, how they fitted together and on how they realised their values in their practice. This phenomenon increased through the interview process as students gained more experience and began to see the connections between their personal values, their professional values and how these related to their practice. Finally, I read the interview data by person, reading through all three interviews from Stages 1 to 3, to understand the change and development in each student over time, adding to the notes I had made previously.

Despite the complexity, I found it most helpful to consider the interview data by key theme, although it took me a while to reach this decision. This approach seemed most appropriate as I wanted to focus on and explore connections across participants in their values development, rather than focus on the individual development of six students. There were similarities in what students were saying in the interviews about their values development that supported this approach.

A more structured process of open coding was then undertaken to allow concepts to emerge from the data. Using Nvivo software to support this, the interviews and journals were read again, section by section, and coded. My first attempt at coding was far too detailed, concentrating on too many micro categories and creating too many codes; it very quickly became unwieldy and unmanageable, so I discarded this attempt, and started again, re- thinking my approach to coding and looking for bigger concepts, in a process described by Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2011:560):

Coding is not a one-off exercise; it requires reading and rereading, assigning and reassigning codes, placing and replacing codes, refining codes and coded data; the process is iterative and requires the researcher to go back and forth through the data on maybe several occasions, to ensure consistency and coverage of codes and data. I used two approaches to coding the interview data: an ‘organisational’ approach, firstly coding the material by my ‘key themes’, so I had all the data relating to each key theme, for example students’ discussion of their personal values, accessible in one place, a broad process akin to ‘lumping’ (Saldaña, 2009:19-20). Reading through the data in these codes, I began a process of ‘splitting’ (Saldaña, ibid) to generate a more nuanced set of codes arising from the data, using conceptual words and phrases, such as ‘aware’, ‘self-realise’, ‘emotion’, ‘confidence’, ‘complexity v simplicity’, ‘difference’ and ‘helpful’ to code examples of these concepts, after which I ‘grouped’ similar codes together to see broader themes. At this point, I sought to understand how these concepts related to students’ value development, through annotating print outs of the grouped coded data and then exploring connections through writing. At many points I found myself getting lost in the richness and detail of the data, requiring me to stand back and seek to make sense of over-arching developmental themes. At this point, I drew on a more instinctive and creative analytical approach, searching for over-arching themes and narratives (Coffey and Atkinson, 1996). The outcomes of this analysis is explored in Chapters Six and Seven.

Although I was already familiar with the student-written journals, for the purposes of this investigation, I analysed the journals, again utilising Nvivo to support this process, using themes identified through a combined inductive and deductive approach (Bryman, 2008). I was aware of some of the ways in which students had used their journals to develop their professional values, but I was also open to themes arising out of the students’ writing that I had not necessarily been expecting and that linked with the interview data themes. Chapter Eight explores how students used their journals to support their value development.