CHAPTER 5

Recording, Managing, and Analyzing Data

A. Recording and Managing Data

The proposal section on research design should include plans for recording data in a
systematic manner that is appropriate and will facilitate analysis. If the proposal is more
“objectivist” in assumptions, the researcher should demonstrate awareness that technique for
recording observation, interaction, and interview will not excessively intrude in the on going
flow of daily events. Plans to use tape recorder, camera and other mechanical devices should
be delineated in the proposal, demonstrating that the researcher will use data recording
strategies that fit the setting and the participants’ sensitivities and that these will only be used
with participant’s consent.
In action and participatory research approaches, the researchers’ intrusiveness in the
setting in not an issue. Because these approaches are fundamentally interactive and include
participants quite fully in framing question and gathering data, the researcher presence is
considerate a quite integral part of the setting.
In addition, the researcher should plan a system to ease retrieval for analysis.
Planning ahead for color coding notes to keep track of dates, names, titles, attendance, at
events, chronologies, description of setting, maps, sociograms, and so on is invaluable for
piecing together patterns, defining categories for data analysis, planning further data
collection, and especially for writing the final product of the research.
Vignette 21 see page 109
Data Management
Vignette 21 is just one researcher’s way of managing complex and thick data. Over
years, researchers have developed a variety of data management strategies ranging from
color and number coding in index cars computer program; these techniques are often shared
as part of the “folklore of fieldwork”. In addition, Schatzman and Strauss’s (1973)
suggestions on observational notes, methodological notes, theoretical notes, a analytic
memos are quite useful. Whatever method is devised, it must enable the researcher to
organize data while making the easily retrievable and manipulable.

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B. Data Analysis Strategies
Data analysis is the process of bringing order, structure, and meaning to the mass of
collected data. It is a messy, ambiguous, time-consuming, creative, and fascinating process.
Qualitative data analysis is a search for general statements about relationship among
categories of data; it builds grounded theory.
This section of the research proposal should describe to the reader initial decisions
about data analysis and should convince the reader that the researchers is sufficiently
knowledgeable about qualitative analysis to consider data organization, theme development
and testing, and report writing.
Whether the researcher structures some of the analysis before data collection or
begins the process during data collection is a judgment call. Generating categories of data to
collect or cells in a matrix can be an important focusing device for the study.
In qualitative studies, data collection and analysis go hand in hand to promote the
emergence of substantive theory grounded in empirical data.

ANALYTIC PROCEDURES
Analytic procedures fall into five modes:
1. Organizing the Data
Reading more through the data forces the researcher to become familiar with
those data in intimate ways. At this time, the researcher could also enter the data into one
of several software programs for the management and/or analysis of qualitative data.
Careful attention to how data are being reduced is necessary throughout the researcher
endeavor. Miles and Huberman (1993) suggest several schemata for recording qualitative
data. Such technique streamline data management, helps ensure reliability across several
researchers and are highly recommended.
2. Generating categories, theme and pattern
The category generation phase of data analysis is the most difficult, complex,
ambiguous, creative and fun. The process of category generation involves noting
regularities in the setting or people chosen for study. Here the researcher does not search
for the exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories of the statistician, but instead to
identify the salient, grounded categories of meaning held by participants in the setting.

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 Analyst-constructed typologies are those created by the researcher as reflecting distinct
categories but not generative of separate language categories.
BEHAVIORS TOWARD DROPOUTS
Taking Sharing
Responsibility responsibility to others
Teacher’s Rehabilitation Counselor/friend: Referral Agent:
Beliefs Help kids directly Refer them to other helping
About agencies
How Maintenance Traffic Cop: Ostrich:
To (care taking) Just keep them moving Ignore situation and hope
Intervene through the system someone else does something
With Old fashioned school Complainer:
Dropouts Punishment master: Somebody should remove the
Make them feel the problem kids
consequences
Figure 5.1. An Empirical
Typology of Teacher Roles with High School Dropouts
Source: Patton (1980. P. 315)
This process entails uncovering patterns, themes and categories and may well be subject
to the “legitimate charge of imposing a world of meaning on the participants that better
effects the observer’s world than the world understudy” (Patton, 1990, p.398)

OUTREACH
Low High
Narrow Authoritarian -
LIMITS Laissez-faire Entrepreneurial

Broad
Figure 5.2. Three Ideal-Typical Approaches to Training and Dissemination
Source: Firestone & Rossman (1986. P. 308)

3. Testing emergent hypothesis

As categories and pattern between them become apparent, the researcher begins
the process of evaluating the plausibility of these developing hypotheses and testing them
through the data.
Part of this phase is to evaluate the data for their informational adequacy,
credibility, usefulness and centrality.

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4. Searching for alternative explanation
As categories and pattern between them emerge in the data, the researcher must
engage in the critical art of challenging the very pattern that seems so apparent. The
researcher must search for other, plausible explanations for these data and the linkages
among them. Alternative explanation always exists; the researcher must search for
identify, and describe them, and then demonstrate how the explanation offered is the
most plausible of all.
5. Writing the report
Writing about qualitative data cannot be separated from the analytic process. In
fact, it is central to that process, for in the choice of particular words to summarize and
reflect the complexity of the data, the researcher engaging in the interpretive act, lending
shape and form-meaning-to massive amounts of raw data.
Several models for writing report exist. Taylor and Bogdan (1984, chaps. 8-12)
suggest five different approaches:
1. The purely descriptive life history. Here the author presents one person’s account of
his or her own life, framing that description with analytic points about the social
significance of that life.
2. The presentation of data gathered through in-depth interviews and participant
observation, where the participants’ perspectives are presented, their worldviews
forming the structural framework for the report.
3. Attempts to relate practice to theory. Here descriptive data are summarized, then
linked to more general theoretical construct.
4. An attempt to build theory by drawing on data gathered from several types of
institutions and under various research conditions.
Van Maanen (1988) identifies three different genres in qualitative writing, they are:
1. Realist tales