This week, I spent Monday to Friday working on my report: listening to audio data that I had collected, filling in summary tables and writing detailed descriptions. It is still in the pre-transcribing stage. I am trying to make precise summaries (of participants, nature, and data content) so that I can discuss them with my supervisors before starting to translate and select the most relevant phases from the entire dataset. This will eventually allow me to work on translations efficiently, save time, and analyse important data in greater depth.
Qualitative methods
I love reading books on qualitative research methods. They give me so many ideas and inspirations on how I should handle my thoughts about data and how to organise it.
They also offer motivations for translating and writing a research report with an eye on what my readers are looking for.
While reading, the following paragraph struck me. I had believed that finishing drafts of literature reviews early was crucial because they can serve as a starting point for which aspect of the data I want to look at. After reading this section, I realised how much time I had spent searching the literature, reading and writing reviews, while putting data aside, before coming to focus on the quality of my data report.
“Your data chapters are crucial to your report and should usually be written first. Try to escape the comfort zone of starting with your literature review. This is for two reasons: 1) you cannot know what is the important literature till you have completed your data analysis; 2) unless you begin your data analysis early, the data will pile up and you may drown in it.” (Silverman, Interpreting Qualitative Data 5E, p.388)
I am aiming to complete my report by Friday next week, although progress is still about 50%. It has exceeded 10,000 words and is reaching 15,000.
My achievements in week 73
- started to sort audio data and wrote summary tables of 23 consultations
Goals for week 74
- finish writing my fieldwork report with summary tables of all data and submit it to my supervisors by 1 June, ideally!
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