As I was preparing the previous post on various online resources related to qualitative data analysis, specifically textual analysis, it occurred to me that in order to utilize those resources, I needed to organize my field notes differently. I have been transferring notes from my jottings book into long form writing, or reports; however, in reading about all those online qualitative data analysis resources, I found myself wondering how to marry those tools with my long form field notes.
This uncomfortable realization also reminded me of other reasons why I am frustrated with long form field notes:
- Once I transform my jottings into long form writing, with proper transitions to increase the readability and sense of the entry, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to convince myself to re-read a majority of my long form entries.
- Not only is it emotionally taxing to re-live each day as I write and then re-read my writing, but I am just not that good of a writer, on the fly, every night, and sometimes the transitions I engineer, to move from one conversation to another, are downright obfuscating on a second or third read.
- I also worry that I lose the flow of conversations – who said what? when? what did I say? All of that becomes muddled when I’m trying to piece my jottings together into some kind of sensible long form whole.
- Once I have pages upon hundreds of pages of these long form pieces of writing, I have to then go back and break the writing back apart so I can code chunks that programs like NVivo or Atlas.ti can chew on and analyze. So, I had pieces, then I, somewhat artificially, made a series of “wholes,” and now I need pieces again. What was the point of the whole, of the long form writing?
- Moreover, how do I code those transitions that I engineered? Sure, I needed them in order to make the whole piece make sense, but what do I do with them when I start to code? Are they data? Do I still need them? Do I use them to then link chucks of coded text?
A lot of these questions and concerns connect back, for me, to my original post, “What is data?” I would like to think that data (good data? my favorite data? the data I feel most comfortable with?) comes directly from the people I am working with: things they said and things they did, or the things they didn’t say, or didn’t do. So the transitions that I created to make my writing make sense don’t really interest me, at least at first.
In my constant daily worry over generating long form writing that is sensible, I think I loose the ability to be critical, make connections, and find holes. So, I am in the process of trying a new data retention method where I transfer every one of the bits I record in my jottings notebook into a separate line on a Microsoft Excel workbook (click: FieldnotesInExcel for an example of what I’m doing – I have changed the names to protect confidentiality).
I fear my professors may come charging toward me, hair on fire, over the choices I have made recently regarding my field notes and how I transfer them from my jottings book to my computer each night; but for me, using Microsoft Excel to compartmentalize unique data points makes me feel like I have a chance at doing some hard core qualitative data analysis eventually.
At the same time, and this is super important, I am still keeping a Microsoft Word file open where I occasionally write long form pieces and let myself try to generate those transitions, which are important, in so far as they challenge me to ask different questions in the field, and ask different questions of my data.
I agree, it’s all data, but some data has to do different things, or work differently, for me, than other data. (I think)
Investigating the Imponderable 