Hi Annette and others

I''ve sent this to the list as it may be of interest to others - also others may wish to comment on my methods - which would be very useful for me. As a research officer on a one year project I work a lot on my own and therefore must apologise for the sweeping generalisations of my previous message which didn't take into account projects with multiple researchers (thanks for clarifying that Ann).

I am currently analysing 9 focus groups in order to inform the design and structure of in-depth interviews and a 'diary' keeping aspect of a research project on 'Community perceptions of 'successful futures' in relation to participation (or not) in community education and training in East Leeds (UK)'.

The groups were conducted by me and audio recorded. They were transcribed by somebody else, read and edited and intially 'mentally' coded by me. I then set up the project in nudist 4 and structured the coding trees (prior to bringing in the documents) to hold case data about each group, gender and age data, site data (where they were held) and data about the reasons people were participating. I also set up general nodes that I knew I wanted to code under like 'succesful futures', 'non-participation' etc. 

I then imported the text documents (the transcripts) and attached a memo to each one containing the notes I made immediately after the group. I proceeded to code each document and in the process refined the coding and introduced many free nodes. This became progressively detailed until I would collapse nodes (by merging them) and introducing new trees which I moved the free nodes into - this made the coding broader but slightly more subtle each time (if that's possible) I was becoming more and more familiar with the data and starting to theorise the categories. I made written notes, introduced annotations into the documents where discussions shifted and for group interaction, and kept a node for ideas. I purposely didn't want each person separated out as it was the interaction of the groups that was also of interest (when I did try to section one document and extract all the contributions from one person it took an age - a problem of working in a 32 bit environment with 16 bit software I think). This process took me 4 weeks (I found I couldn't sit coding at the computer for more than 5 -6 hours in a day and my machine crashed several times a day).

When I'd finished this initial coding I did some useful text searches to check and further refine and restructure the coding. I intersected and united some nodes to start to develop my theories about the relationships between them which was really useful but I also ended up staring at the categories for a long time on screen and found myself printing ridiculous numbers of lists and going back to coloured pens.  Then yesterday my NVIVO software arrived and I imported the project into NVIVO and was able to start detailed analysis of the nodes I'd ended up with - using the colours available and the slicker coding system (It just felt possible with NVIVO but perhaps I needed something new to play with - plus the machine hasn't crashed once). I've been going through each node, recoding for propositions and orientation which I have started to model for relational and directional attributes - it's amazing how important the type of arrow you use becomes! I am still at this stage - slowly building theories of perceptions of school as social or institutional (and of course as both) and the relationship betweeen the two for motivation, the process of teaching and learning and how this supports or hinders continuing participation and progression etc, etc there's still a lot to do.

The matrices or typologies of participation and perceptions of learning, work and futures that I end up with will be used in designing the interview schedule for piloting - in giving me hypotheses to work on and talk around and about with the interviewees - using the data from the focus groups. As you can tell I'm not a sophisticated user but this has worked so far for me and is proving more functional and operationally feasible than manual coding - which I have previously used with small numbers of interviews.

Sorry this is so long - but I hope it is of some use.

Best wishes

Helen





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