I had the privilege of listening to Martyn Hammersley talk about qualitative data analysis yesterday. Ok so it was about two months too late, but that didn't detract from the sheer quality and brilliance of the presentation. I think he is just such a good teacher - he is clear, comprehensive, knowledgeable, approachable, gentle, unassuming, open. While sitting in the room listening to him I kept thinking to me myself - I want to be able to talk like that about my research, about my research methodology - simple, clear English underpinned by a deep understanding of all the complexity that does into qualitative data analysis. It was such an inspiration. He was able to unpack the actual process of data analysis - in concrete, discrete, practical steps - without diminishing the complexity of the task. Some other interesting things he mentioned yesterday
- In planning a qualitative PhD research project (and more so for an ethnographic study) his estimation is that you need at least 1 1/2 years after all your data collection to finish the thesis (this means I'm about 3 months off)
- for an ethnographic project you cannot under estimate the amount of time required to 'process' your raw data and get it into a format where you can start to use it (again this took me roughly 3 months and I think I was super speedy)
- grounded theory is really an approach to research design, not a data analysis approach
- analysis software can't do the analysis for you, such software is most productively used for the storage, categorisation and retrieval of large sets of data
An excellent session and of course he invited us to e-mail him if we had any major questions which couldn't be addressed during the short time allocated to the session. Guess what I'm going to be doing?
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