Feeling Disconnected from the Data

When we sat in class on the day the research project was presented to us in Adam’s Elite Schooling in the Global Contextclass, I had no idea what doing this project would entail. I did not even fully understand what the process of reading the data, a process that Adam insisted was very important, truly meant. With all of this in mind, I was quite intimidated. The gravity of what reading the data would be like did not hit me until I picked up the data binder from Adam’s office. I decided to use the binder because I prefer not to read on computers and knew that I would get more out the reading experience this way. However, my nervousness was only increased by the sight of this large, dense binder full of pages and pages of transcriptions of interviews with students, teachers, and alumni of the Croft School.

The binder sat on my desk for a few days. It and its contents felt so foreign to me. Part of me was excited to see what all of the pages said but a larger part of me wanted to never open it. I felt like it did not belong to me and that what was inside was not for my eyes. It took me about three days to work up the courage to open the binder and begin reading its contents. When I began reading, I was so interested in what was on the page. Some of the stories were so similar to my past experiences with elite secondary schooling and some were not, seeing as these students were in a cultural context entirely different from my own, and it was so exciting to be reading these first-hand accounts of their super elite school. Yet, while I was finding the stories interesting, I noticed that it was hard for me to identify who had said what and where the individual students had differed in their responses. The words on the pages were so interesting but still felt very far outside of myself, as I gathered large-scale ideas about this place without connecting to the individual stories of the Croft School members. Even after doing all of this reading and note taking, I never listened to the student’s voices telling these stories and I never felt super connected to the data I had read.

At this point, I had this mass of data in my head and it was all pretty jumbled. I knew the common threads that were presented in the data, but the individual voices were absent from their stories. I knew that if I wanted to give this project the care and respect it deserved, I would have to do something to improve my relationship with this data. I had done some transcribing of data in the past and knew that listening to the data often helped me form more of a connection with what I was hearing. So, I went back and listened to or watched at least a few minutes of each interview and reviewed my notes so that I could connect a face and voice to these stories. After this process, I felt a bit better about my connection with this data, but I was hoping that this process of listening to the data would have done more for me and my connection with it. At this point, I still did not feel like my connection with it was as good as, say someone who did the interview, I felt that it had improved a bit and more or less reached a level where I could work with it. For me, part of this process has been coming to terms with the fact that the data will always feel a little bit out of reach for me, as I do not know it as well as someone who was there to collect it and see the life at this school in action.

As stated by Labaree in the “Characteristics of Qualitative Research” section of the Research Guide for USC, one of the benefits of qualitative research is the ability for the researcher to have direct contact with the subjects of their research and to have the opportunity to really get to know the setting, culture, and lives of those the researcher is looking at. Working with data that was collected by someone else is a challenge because you do not have the opportunity to have the same level of connection with it. Although my connection with the research will never be as deep as that of a researcher, I do feel that this listening to the data was a step in the right direction. By hearing the voices and seeing the faces of the members of the Croft School community, it helped me connect better with what I was reading in personal life and experience instead of just the abstract of words on a page.

 

I feel as though my ongoing process with this data will allow me to continue to form a relationship with it and I am looking forward to what that connection will look like. I am also curious to continue to examine and explore why this desire to connect to the data is so important to me. Is it that I feel disconnected from this data because of my cultural distance or simply because I was not present to collect it? Will this distance allow me to be a better researcher because it will help me navigate and avoid biases or will it limit me, as I struggle to connect with it because it is not truly mine? These are all questions that I will continue to explore as I spend more time with this data.

References
Labaree, R. V. (28 September 2018). Organizing your Social Sciences Research Paper: Purpose of Guide. Retrieved from https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/purpose.