Understanding what I'm doing

Last week after supervision I had a little 'crisis of confidence' episode. I didn't feel very certain about the procedures I was using to guide my coding activities. When I feel like that I usually ask for help or try to find help - so I asked the supervisors and tried to find some relevant literature. To me it doesn't matter if someone else thinks that I'm handling a situation well, it's how I feel about my handling of the situation that often matters. I just wanted some reassurance what I was on the right path and guidance if I wasn't.

I found Jennifer Mason's 'Qualitative Researching' and used the chapter on 'Organising and Indexing Qualitative Date'. Not only did it provide the necessarily reassurances I needed, often supporting the very practices I had put in place to guide what I was calling 'coding', it also suggested some additional practical procedures I could use as I continued to forge ahead with this stage of my research.

Often with qualitative informed methodologies, you are simply told - 'immerse yourself in your data', 'let your data talk to you' or 'just code for themes' - but what does this really mean? When you 'do' these things, or what you think constitutes 'doing these things', very often if doesn't measure up to the expectations of those who told you to 'do' it in the first place. Sometimes the literature can and does help - it provides a language of description for the things you are doing and clear steps that can be taken to guide your practice. Now I feel more confident in explaining what I am currently doing i.e. that I'm in the data organisations and indexing phase of my research, why this phase is important and how it fits into the rest of my research study.

So....a) I'm trying to create indexing categories that allow me to tag sections of my data, b) I have chosen to read my data in an interpretative and reflexive manner, c) these categories are related to the intellectual puzzle I'm trying to solve through my research, the type of data I've collected and my research questions, d)  using Atlas means I have a data base-type solution for the indexing and quick retrieve of data chunks - Atlas is not an analysis tool, I am only using it as an organisation and retrieve tool, the analysis of the chunks of data so easily accessible via the Atlas software will come much later.

And...in addition to these somewhat conceptual thoughts about what this phase of my research entails, Mason also offers some practical suggestions about what immersion might mean, like just listening to my recordings and re-reading my fieldnotes again, without the Atlas imposed categorisations I have already imposed and that it is perfectly ok to revise and review the indexing categories I already have. These categories don't automatically become your themes...and how you use the chunks of data is depended on many things, which her chapter on 'Marking Convincing arguments with qualitative data' will no doubt illuminate.