Talking,wrestling,and recycling: an investigation of three analytic approaches to qualitative data in education research

Process and subject of inquiry

As previously stated, this project began when each of the authors put their respective theoretical and methodological frameworks to work on the same piece of data. We then met to discuss our analyses, and explored some of the similarities and differences in our understandings of the data. These conversations quickly expanded our initial intentions for the project, and became what we now, in hindsight, understand as the second phase of the project that resulted in a complex process of reflexivity and cross-paradigmatic dialogue. Overall, this process extended over one calendar year and provided the material for the writing of this paper, which we might now understand as the third phase of our inquiry (Richardson and St. Pierre, 2005).

Data generation

Data for this paper was drawn from two sources: 1) an audio-taped excerpt of an interview between Kyle, ¹ a 10-year-old boy, and Diane, that took place in the library of the child’s school; 2) field notes and fragments written and audio-recorded during conversations amongst the three of us about our analyses. The audio data of the interview was part of Diane’s doctoral research. This five-minute excerpt was from a 30-minute interview and was selected because it represented a relatively complete interaction, and because it was available in its original audio-recorded format for each of the authors to analyze separately. In sharing the data with the other authors, Diane sent Lyndsay and Mia both the audio track of the interview and an initial transcription with descriptions of some of the non-verbal actions that occurred during the interview. The initial transcript of the interview is presented below (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Interview with Kyle, 9 February 2010. Excerpt.

Subsequent to our initial individual analyses, we began a series of extended discussions about the analyses, our respective methodologies, discourses, and possibilities for dissemination. These conversations were instrumental in the development of our initial findings concerning the diversity of results dependent on methodological approach. Our conversations were recorded through audio-taping, note-taking, and follow-up email exchanges. The generation of data such as notes and audio-recordings was not preplanned within systematic parameters, as this process and our interactions evolved over time. Subsequent to a conference presentation early in this project, and in response to our in-person conversations about the details of data representation (for example, we discussed the theoretical importance of including or excluding the transcript in the presentation of our research), our conversations widened to include a focus on reflexivity, but also to how our interactions about our divergence and convergence could be seen as useful data. Our methodological approach during this phase of our project was experimental and emergent. We begun the project unsure of where it would take us.

A final, and perhaps most challenging, phase of the project came with the writing of the manuscript that we would submit for publication. Although ideas had been evolving for some time, the process of writing and consolidating our ideas and perspectives continued a rich process of inquiry. Determining what we wanted to share and how we wanted to share it has been a process that has no clear conclusion.

One piece of data, three perspectives: an interview with Kyle

In the next sections, we provide a taste of what each of us found when we analyzed the short interview with Kyle from our respective positions. We offer these short analyses as illustrations for how researchers might approach their own data from different perspectives.

Conversations: part 1

In part, this paper offers three different ways to approach qualitative data analysis in education research. As such, it provides an illustration of three different methodologies in action and suggests the importance of recognizing the effects that methodological choices have on the kinds of questions that can be asked and the kinds of answers that are found. In examining the three analyses of this data, through conversation and critical feedback, we found that although there were many areas of commonality, there were also multiple areas of difference. While we each began feeling that we shared a very similar post-positivist orientation, through our discussions we learned to see how diverse even this shared heritage could be. Through structured collaboration we became aware of the spaces between our individual perspectives and methods, and those of our close colleagues. These spaces, or divergences, were all at once unsettling, and liberating, and they were quickly filled in with rich discussion, debate, and conversation. These possibilities for deeper analysis and reflection occurred at various moments and intersections of our project, and were made explicit as we attempted to talk across unfamiliar traditions, and articulate our own assumptions and processes in relation to each other’s work.

The following section touches on some of the commonalities and contrasts of our methodological journey, explored through shared findings and reflections on our methodological choices.

Common threads of interest were related to the possibilities afforded by the relationship between Diane and Kyle, the roles taken up by them in this context, and the potential interpretations of Kyle’s wrestler statements or performances. However, through conversation, these areas were teased out and emerged as topics relevant and understood in different ways, and ultimately as different products of our theoretical frameworks. Diane was interested in how adult–child power relations might be shifted (in this context and in educational contexts more broadly) and how Kyle’s wrestler performance offered a new kind of text and a display of Kyle’s expertise. Lyndsay was similarly interested in research roles, how Kyle and Diane took up and challenged roles, and focused on the production of identities in and through the talk of the interview excerpt. She was also interested in the tools used in the interaction, but was less concerned with the performances of wrestling per se and the home–school connections important to Diane. Mia, interested in the possibilities and performances offered to Kyle and to Diane in this conversational space, saw Kyle taking on an imagined persona of wrestler at the same time that he occupied other performances, including that of research participant. Kyle’s desires, ideas, and representations were seen as influenced by forces that can be located in the interview context as well as the social and cultural contexts of school, wrestling, family, and so on.

One of the occasions when our assumptions about research and analysis became most visible was during our discussion of the merit or importance of presenting the full transcript when disseminating our findings to potential readers/audiences. For a particular conference presentation, Diane and Mia did not feel the need to present the transcript of the interview, and indeed preferred not to, whereas Lyndsay felt it was an important aspect of the presentation. This initial difference of opinion began a much larger discussion about what counts as data, and led us to more nuanced, specific, and differentiated understandings of our respective positions. For the purposes of this study, we have attempted to take up our three methodological approaches in as uncomplicated a form as possible. Having said that, the complexities and limitations of our respective methodologies have never been more apparent than they are now, at the end of this project. The following section summarizes some of the critiques that resulted in our diverse positionings.

Mia, positioned within the post-structural frame of rhizomatic analyses, previously moved away from social semiotics as a methodological approach when she recognized that it depended on an understanding of data as pieces of representation (texts, images, settings, etc.) and therefore fixed or concrete in some way. It did not adequately give her the tools to analyse change, movement, and embodiment. She acknowledges that there is an element of semiotics in an affective mapping; like there is an inevitable reliance upon representational thought (the reasons for this include her training, the common discourses and terminology at her disposal, and the paradigm of thought that dominates our society). While Lyndsay appreciates the way social semiotics allows analysts to celebrate ‘out of school literacies’, she feels the approach is ultimately too broad for her and lacks an attention to the details of social processes and how meaning is co-constructed between people in specific social interactions.

Diane, who uses social semiotics, would not use an ethnomethodological approach because of the magnified focus on small pieces of linguistic data. Mia has an underlying interest in the complex interrelations that binds together the human, the non-human, the material and the virtual; based on this, while some scholars have worked to bring ethnomethodology to data beyond talk (Ball and Smith, 2011; Francis and Hart, 1997; Goodwin, 2001), for the most part, an ethnomethodological analysis does not afford her the tools, or lens, to see beyond the specific bounded circumstances of an interaction represented primarily through linguistic data.

Diane would not use a rhizomatic analysis, primarily because of the audience for whom she is writing and the daily context within which she does her academic work. Her intentions are to connect with theoretical frames that she sees as accessible, in terms that relate to educators’ everyday work. Lyndsay enjoys reading her colleague’s rhizomatic analyses, and is intrigued by the inclusion of inanimate objects, including the natural world, and yet, like Diane, she is not ready to use it in her own work. Like Diane, Lyndsay finds the approach less accessible than her method of choice. Lyndsay feels ethnomethodology’s focus on everyday talk, often classroom talk, can be remarkably useful in connecting with practicing and pre-service teachers and for illustrating social processes in educational institutions.

A consideration of the some of the reasons behind our methodological choices can be further unpacked by an overview of the various understandings afforded by the different methods of analysis undertaken. For example, from a social semiotic/sociocultural reading, we can see that when popular culture is legitimized as a resource in institutional settings like interviews, children may be more able to appropriate familiar genres and relocalize them for specific purposes. In other words, sanctioning the use of popular culture in institutional settings may afford children a wider range of options for expressing themselves. This perspective reminds us that everyday texts and textmaking practices can be viewed as creative through a consideration of multimodal performances as texts, and an examination of the processes of hybrid textmaking.

From an ethnomethodological reading, we can see that both Kyle and the Interviewer work together to make meaning of their interaction and to both transform, and conserve, the institution of the interview. This analysis suggests that children and adults are both agents in their interactions and that they can, and do, transform institutions in and through their talk in interaction. Educators are alerted to the work being done in our classrooms every day to make and remake different institutions, and we are prompted to think about which institutions we want to transform, and which ones we want to conserve.

From a rhizomatic perspective, an examination of this data suggests we can rethink the ways that we evaluate expected and unexpected behavior, order, and breaks from order. This allows us to think about ruptures in terms of new possibilities for experience. We can also see the implications of introducing performative modes, like the video camera, for enabling Kyle’s experiments with positions and subjectivities outside of his own familiar and expected performances of self.

Conversations: part 2

In this final section, we focus on two critical characteristics of the project outlined: discourse (in this case taken up to describe the words we use and the meanings we grant those words) and reflexivity. These two aspects of research emerged as profoundly significant to the choices we make as researchers, to the affordances of our methods, and to the potential implications of the work.

In talking across paradigms, it became plain that discourse was a distinguishing factor that created intersections and allowed us to think through data in different directions. Diane depended on terms that described texts and textual performances in terms of play, parody, and relocalization with a focus on what is created and creative about new texts. Identity is a useful term within social semiotics, in this case organizing recognizable, yet socially constructed, positions for researcher and participant. Lyndsay understood the data as conversational turns, and highlighted how interlocuters in the data extract oriented themselves within the interaction. The notion of talk is taken up as central to the ethnomethodological approach, and actions and identities are seen to be performed in and through this talk. Mia drew on post-structural language that attempts to avoid fixed categories. Movement, interrelations, and space are described in terms of rhizomatic lines (lines of segmentarity, lines of flight) and affects. Actions and representations of meaning are taken in terms of performance and relations.

Like language translation, speaking across disciplines is not an exact science, meanings are contextually bound, definitions are slippery, and what a term means within the context of one methodological tradition may be different in another. ‘Text’, for example, is a central and complex term within social semiotics, taken up to describe representational communication of many forms, it can be broken down into linguistic, visual, gestural, to name but a few. Within ethnomethodology, due to the linguistic focus of the analysis, text is often the substitute for, or representation of, talk. Within a rhizomatic analysis, text is generally understood as that which is a static representation of one moment in time within a much larger and moving interaction of forces and affects.

There are other terms that are used productively in one approach and excluded almost entirely in another. Take ‘identity’, for example: within Diane’s social semiotic analysis, identity is a critical term used to summarize the participant’s recognizable positions as a student, as a boy, or as a wrestler. In addition to this, however, identity is also understood as something that can be taken on and then shed again, or as a text in itself that can be made, and then re-made. An ethnomethodologist would see identity as something that is spoken into being, in and through an interaction, rather than as something that can be transported between interactions and yet, interlocuters will often assume identities that would recognizable outside the specific interaction (eg. adult/child; teacher/student). In a rhizomatic analysis, identity would be regarded as fixed representational category (student, boy, wrestler, etc.) that does not contribute to an understanding of the complex, unique, and always moving positions of a participant. Rather, the term ‘subjectivity’ may be more frequently drawn on within a rhizomatic analysis as a way to describe a state in relation and in a constant state of motion.

Aside from the subtleties and significance of many aspects of our discourse, there are of course terms that carry consistent weight and meaning across all three approaches. One of these terms was reflexivity. As our conversations delved into notions of bias, researcher positioning, and assumptions, it became clear that the practice of reflexivity was not only pivotal in our individual approaches to research, but was the driving force in our collaboration overall. To our surprise, although we all identified ourselves as qualitative researchers, our own familiarity with quantitative and positivist traditions crept into our interactions as we worked through notions such as ‘blind spots’ in research, and the possibility that we might ‘see’ those blind spots in search of a more truthful representation of the data under analysis.

In qualitative research, reflexivity has been variously defined as self-analysis or awareness of one’s position within one’s research (Lincoln and Guba, 1984; Maxwell, 2005); critical consciousness of one’s agenda; responsibility to those researched (Fine and Weis, 1998; Foley, 2002); and ‘reflexivities of discomfort’ (Pillow, 2003: 188) that involve constant and rigorous questioning at all stages of conducting and writing research. What emerged through our work together is that reflexivity in itself is a process of research, accompanied by a paradigm, a set of methods, and research questions. It is a process that is rarely described, but generally accepted as being embedded in contemporary post-positivist social science research. Reflexivity then became a central topic of inquiry, and our understanding of it has been deeply enriched. We do not claim to have unearthed a method of reflexive practice that would work for all, but we do propose that cross-paradigm conversations can play an important contribution to meaningful reflexive practice. Amongst other things, these conversations, when undertaken with supportive and critical friends or colleagues, can raise difficult questions, unravel assumptions, encourage new ideas, and above all continue and expand inquiry through the articulation of process and findings in the detail and language that is accessible to all involved.

The spaces between our approaches and analyses made explicit and tangible the partial and contingent nature of the work we do in qualitative research. The intellectual understanding of this contingency, that we all comfortably claim, has been tested and revisited again and again through the collaborative engagement of this study. Theory materialized in practice. At the same time, the spaces in which we saw our differences at times became places where we found ourselves adjusting, adapting, and responding to each other in a movement (albeit unintentional) towards cohesion. One of many questions that emerged was: is our research, in part, about persuasion or about winning audiences over to our point of view? Struggles over representation and compromises in the process created tensions and questions that could not be easily resolved. This paper can be seen in some ways as a paradox in play: three researchers at once attempting to differentiate paradigms and processes, while at the same time we attempt to draw the other in and find a common purpose.

This project began as a methodological and hypothetical inquiry that, once begun, quickly unraveled into a vast and complicated conversation: one that we believe has great significance. This paper alerts researchers and consumers of research to the need for reflexivity in our analysis and our evaluation of other researchers’ analyses. During our process of analyzing and discussing our analyses, all three authors found their assumptions about research, analysis, and representation were challenged and their own scholarship was enriched. It is through dialogue with each other across paradigms and methods that we gain a more nuanced understanding of the interactions that we participate in as researchers and as educators.