Falling Down the Data Hole

Getting to do research on Ghana is kind of like a dream come true to me. And it all goes back to the $100 spit test that I sent to AncestryDNA.com. Ever since I found out that  my genetic heritage is from Ghana and Ivory Coast, I have been looking for more  opportunities to learn about their culture. About my  culture. Entering this class I was already somewhat familiar with the work that Adam was doing with elite schools around the world: I took a previous  class with him last semester where he would pull from his research in Taiwan. Seeing the information on the other 5 schools made me realize just how much work and time Adam had been putting into this project.  I was very anxious to see what he found out about the elite school system in Ghana. I have to admit when I first opened up the data file for the first student interview, I was so intimidated. In the student tab, it ranged from 1-3 interviews for each student. This was no surprise to me but when I clicked on the file the shocking part was that there was 12 pages worth of dialogue just for one interview.

I did not expect there to be so many pages of dialogue. My mind raced at the thought of what the other student interview files held , let alone how many interviews to each student there was. Immediately, I frantically clicked between the students’ files trying to get an overall glance at how many pages there were  for every interview between each student. I found that 3 out of 5 students had 3 interviews and 1 student had three interviews condensed into two documents. Let’s not forget that on top of the student interviews there were alumni interview s, teacher interviews,  and just general debriefing information that I needed to read all the way through in just two weeks. I questioned if I would get this done but I knew if I took a more aggressive approach to reading through the data then I might be able to pull it off. That being said, I literally scheduled out time onto my Google calendar designated to sit down and just read through the transcripts. I scheduled an hour each day whether it was in the morning or at  night or at the end of reading for my reading responses. Luckily, my weekends are pretty free so I was able to get a huge chunk of data reading out the way and ended up finishing sooner than I expected. It very quickly came clear to me that the value of Pan-African-ism was something that each and every student, alumni, and teacher held paramount. This value  could be due to the fact that in most African countries the Pan-African ideal is a huge part of  the schooling system. Despite this, most of the students went to American or European universities for college instead of remaining in Africa at an elite college. Could this be due to the fact that  the school we are researching does not offer the placement test necessary for entry into those Ghanaian and other African colleges? Could the western influences that globalization bring along result in the inevitable exit of their involvement in the Pan-African culture? How could we not explore its ties to Western influences on globalization within the Ghanaian elite school system?I’m simply glad that my research team also picked up on the theme. That made coming up with the research question that much easier.