{"id":5629,"date":"2018-12-11T22:15:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T03:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/?p=5629"},"modified":"2018-12-11T22:15:00","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T03:15:00","slug":"navigating-interpretations-of-and-contradictions-in-the-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/2018\/12\/11\/navigating-interpretations-of-and-contradictions-in-the-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Navigating Interpretations of and Contradictions in the Data"},"content":{"rendered":"
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http:\/\/www.timehd.net\/jigsaw-puzzle-meme.html<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

     In a past blog post<\/a>, I have addressed just how challenging it can be to work with data that you did not collect yourself. By not having the ability to control the questions asked or be present for the interviews, it can be hard to truly wrap your head around what message they were trying to convey to the interviewer, or more importantly, what they communicated by not explicitly sharing some information. Yet, this is the hand you are dealt with this research project. Knowing that I have no control over the data I have has made it quite challenging to synthesize it for the narrative findings and pull out the relevant quotes, as I was never too sure if I was interpreting the content of their speech correctly. In the process of writing up one of the narrative findings for our paper, I have been navigating the challenges of finding the correct way to interpret what students and teachers are trying to say through the content of their interviews and determining how to navigate contradictions in the data that go against our general findings. <\/p>\n

     The narrative finding that I am writing about has to do with the fact that students at the Croft School know that service work is important, but they do not do it outside of the school context and that they know it has little impact, demonstrating their lack of personal connection to this work. In order to represent this view, I am pulling quotes about what service work students do, how they feel about the impact that it is having, and why they feel that this work matters to them. The main challenge with this process is making sure that when I am pulling quotes, I am not putting words into these students mouths or assuming what they want to say so that I can make their quote fit into my data. In order to do this, my method of choice was to lay out all of my relevant quotes and read through my narrative findings with just the quotes first to ensure that after reading, I had conveyed the message that I was hoping for. Once I felt that I had successfully done that, I went in and added my own text to connect and introduce each of the ideas in my narrative findings and each of the quotes individually. Although I could not have been there when collecting the data to know exactly what they meant, I felt that this process was allowing me to be most true to the data. Through this process, I felt that I had allowed the quotes to speak for themselves, meaning that the best process for analysis was actually offering minimal formal analysis, ensuring that the message conveyed was that of the students and teachers experience, and not the message that I had decided I wanted them to share.<\/p>\n

     
\n     While it took me some time to determine the best way to go about this part of the writing process, it was not the most difficult thing I had to do. While so many of my quotes represented exactly what we were trying to argue in our paper, that students have a lack of connection to service work, there were some outliers. Some quotes talked about how students are all aware of how important service work is, and some mentioned that some students graduate from the Croft School to do service work as a profession or in college. With these examples, it was hard to say that students did not care about their service work in a cut-and-dry way. There were obviously some contradictions that needed to be navigated here. I struggled long and hard with what to do with my contradictions. I knew it wasn\u2019t right to ignore them, as they had some meaning to them in the grand scheme of this research. I chose to add them towards the end of my section, using them to point out that this work does have a positive impact on some students who do it. Yet, as it says in \u201cAnalyzing Qualitative Interview Data: The Discourse Analytic Method\u201d by Sanna Talja, the process of analyzing and interpreting qualitative data has to do with putting together what is called the \u201cjigsaw puzzle\u201d and acknowledging significant and strong patterns that are found in the data (Talja, 1999, p.467). While some of the Croft students acknowledged that some students allowed this service work to have a positive impact on their life post-Croft School, the overwhelming majority of students and teachers seemed to note that this work is not being done in a genuine way. This idea, one of our main ideas, had not been disproven. It had its contradictions but that did not make it invalid.<\/p>\n

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http:\/\/www.quickmeme.com\/meme\/35pt2d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

     By noting that this pattern had some contradictions, I feel that I will have more to work with when moving on to my analysis section of the paper. In being able to state that some students do go on to do this work, we can show through Bourdieu\u2019s work on capital that they are taking the forms of cultural capital that the Croft School gave them and bringing them into their future, allowing their capital the potential to shift, change, or increase (Bourdieu, 1996). What this shows is that this service work is benefitting them in many ways that will extend beyond their time at the Croft School. They can take this cultural capital and use it to demonstrate their morality and humility to job prospects and universities. In looking at this data in this way, we can finally show how this idea supports our main idea: these students do not have a deep connection to the service work that they are doing. Whether they do this work while only at the Croft School or beyond, they are using their time and experiences with service to provide them with more cultural capital that will benefit them in the future, not in respect to their character and care for others but in the professional realmto advance their advantages. Therefore, while this example did explicitly contradict our main point, in examining it as part of the pattern and puzzle that is our data, we can see that it not only fits in with the data, but further proves our point as well.<\/p>\n

      
\nAs I mentioned, the fact that I had no part in collecting this data was an added challenge. When I went to use the data, I had to interpret, analyze, and sometimes it felt like I had to assume. So much lies in the words of the participants, but I worried that I was missing other important aspects, such as their body language, intonation, or perhaps some diverted eye contact. This process of figuring out how to interpret the data and navigating its contradictions has been one of finding the best way to take the data at its word and doing everything that I can to allow it to speak for itself while also finding its patterns and ensuring that these commonalities were made visible by noting interesting trends within the data.  <\/p>\n

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References:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1996). The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power<\/em>. (Clough, L.C., Trans). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1989)<\/p>\n

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Talja, S. (1999). \u201cAnalyzing qualitative interview data: The discourse analytic method.\u201d Library & Information Science Research, 21(4), 459-477. <\/p>\n

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\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

     In a past blog post, I have addressed just how challenging it can be to work with data that you did not collect yourself. By not having the ability to control the questions asked or be present for the interviews, it can be hard to truly wrap your head around what message they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5629"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8048"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5629"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5633,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5629\/revisions\/5633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}