Designing Research for Qualitative Data Analysis

"Qualitative data analysis aims to make sense of the abundant, varied, mostly nonnumeric forms of information that accrue during an investigation. As qualitative researchers, we reflect not only on each piece of data by itself but also on all the data as an integrated, blended, composite package. Increasingly, qualitative researchers are participants in interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research teams for which analytic and interpretive processes are necessarily complementary, distinct, clearly articulated, and critical to the larger investigation. We search for insight, meaning, understanding, and larger patterns of knowledge, intent, and action in what we generate as data. Approaching this task in a responsive, inductive, transparent, yet systematic way demands our best balance of good science, appropriate rigor and quality, and openness to unanticipated findings. Many qualitative studies now include multiple sources of data, including narrative or textual and visual (e.g., photographs, videos, creative works and art, and theatric or performative components) information for analysis. Thorne (2008) describes the analytic process as moving 'from pieces to patterns' (p. 142) through the activities of organizing, reading and reviewing mindfully, coding, reflection, thematic derivation, and finding meaning."

(Jennifer B. Averill)

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Wildish Bambino: This is the TV

Wildish Bambino's This is the TV. 2018. BBC One, The Lenny Henry Birthday Show. 22 August 2018, 4 minutes.

Leading Lady Parts: a satire on the problem of having to measure-up to an idealised concept of what it means to be a woman

Sweden: Truth, Lies and Manipulated Narratives

"Good Sweden vs Bad Sweden. Sweden is usually recognised as being innovative, transparent and progressive, with good healthcare, welfare and gender equality. More recently, however, a growing chorus of Sweden sceptics have emerged. In this report, Gabriel Gatehouse went to find out more about these competing narratives."

Sweden: Truth, Lies and Manipulated Narratives. 2018. BBC Two, BBC Newsnight. 22 August 2018, 22:30, 18 minutes.

From cause to relation

"For the occidental tradition, the idea of God is intimately related to the idea of causality. That means that for any chain of facts it is reasonable to postulate an absolute beginning, which can be called 'God'. Nevertheless, if instead of explaining the universe through the principle of causality we decide to refer to the pure idea of a 'form' -as one can speak of 'rhetorical (or mathematical) forms'-, the chain ceases to be factual and becomes structural and iterative, like a grammar, and there is no longer any way to avoid the possibility of denying a 'real' beginning. The entities in the world become figures in a diagram, the ontological 'history' becomes a rhetorical 'texture' (trama), and God (written with upper initial) may always 'be moved' by some other 'god' (with lower initial), and so on, following a never ending texture 'of dust, and time, and dream and agonies'".

(Ivan Almeida, Cristina Parodi, 1996)

Almeida, I. and C. Parodi (1996). "Borges and the Ontology of Tropes." Variaciones Borges(2).

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