Preparing for the Paper

Identify two major themes for your research–sounds like an easy task at first glance. That being said, it takes a lot more effort than expected. In order for my group to choose our two major themes for our project, it took a great deal of searching through our coding, and debatesabout what would best fit our research question, which focused on sports and the connection it has with Everdeen. With four members of our group coding the interviews, we were bound to all have different key-words that proved to be most prevalent.

We began with the idea that gender was going to be a major theme within our research–therefore, going into coding, I was hyper-aware of anything that had to do with gender within the interviews. Much to my dismay, I came out of the coding process with very little findings of the role gender playedin athletics at Everdeen. I was under the impression that maybe I just did not read into the dialogue as deeply as I should have. After meeting with our group, it was soon realized that all of us were not as successful when trying to find ways in which gender injects itself within athletics at the school as we originally had hoped.

We were all slightly at a loss, how do we move forward with our research when there is not much information that can answer our research question? We quickly realized that we were going to have to find a different focus for the project. After discussing all of our codes, we realized that each interview incorporated the topic of global citizenship.

Our next task was to tie global citizenship and athletics together due to the fact that both popped up frequently in our coding. We reached the conclusion that one of our themes would focus on the promotion of global citizenship through sports, along with the other being the pressures that come hand and hand with it. Ultimately, these were the best fit themes for our groups research.

When creating the outline for our final paper, it was easy for us to identify outside sources from readings we had previously studied in class, such as Adam’s essay on sports in elite schools, along with some of Bourdieu’s theories in The State of Nobility.We are now faced with the task of picking apart the literature, and deciding what theories prove to be relevant to our research.

Following this step, we are soon going to start writing a draft of our paper. Quite honestly, this seems extremely daunting to me. I have never been a part of such a large research project before, and am a little bit nervous about what information to add into the paper–Is it relevant? Is it redundant? The latter question being my biggest concern. Within all of our research and coding, we all had very similar statements from the interviews, as expected. I am interested to see how all of the quotes will be incorporated due to the fact that majority of them are quite similar. Overall, I am sure once we get further into the writing process it will become easier, but for now it is proving to be a puzzle as to what and what not to include in the final paper.