Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Chapter 6 in process
The second third of this chapter is building up. At first working with so much data made me feel a little lost. How was I to organize myself? There were so many things to talk about! So I started to look for themes, following Gee’s recommendation. He stated, “look across the whole interview for themes, motifs, or images that co-locate (correlate) with each other; that is, themes, images, or motifs that seem to ‘go together’” (Gee, 2005, p. 153).
I decided to reduce my data, so that I could identify themes in an easier way. From the beginning, I had threaded discussions raw data (126 pages) that was organized into stories: taking each threaded discussion, building tree diagrams, and converting the tree branches into separate stories (99 two-column pages). Gee suggests identifying the components of each story into six story parts, and that I did. Even more, he suggests identifying stanzas, units of language that consider a single idea. So I took the stanza titles alone and was able to reduce the data set to eighteen pages. From here, themes were easier to identify because stanza titles were similar. So now, I am using both, my themes and stories to write.
It was hard to start writing. I remembered hearing my professor talking about the importance of an outline to organize your ideas, the same I tell my students. So I looked at the outline from the previous chapter and started thinking of how this chapter had to be organized. But this did not help either.
I then decided to write an introduction to the second third of the chapter and this was what got me started. The paragraph sounded more like a summary and from it I was able to organize my ideas in an outline. The next step was to write the sections for each entry of the outline, and that is what I am working with right now.
My goal is to finish by Friday – I am afraid to say. This would keep me on track to finish by August.
Reference:
Gee, J. P. (2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and methods (2nd. ed.). NY: Routledge.
I decided to reduce my data, so that I could identify themes in an easier way. From the beginning, I had threaded discussions raw data (126 pages) that was organized into stories: taking each threaded discussion, building tree diagrams, and converting the tree branches into separate stories (99 two-column pages). Gee suggests identifying the components of each story into six story parts, and that I did. Even more, he suggests identifying stanzas, units of language that consider a single idea. So I took the stanza titles alone and was able to reduce the data set to eighteen pages. From here, themes were easier to identify because stanza titles were similar. So now, I am using both, my themes and stories to write.
It was hard to start writing. I remembered hearing my professor talking about the importance of an outline to organize your ideas, the same I tell my students. So I looked at the outline from the previous chapter and started thinking of how this chapter had to be organized. But this did not help either.
I then decided to write an introduction to the second third of the chapter and this was what got me started. The paragraph sounded more like a summary and from it I was able to organize my ideas in an outline. The next step was to write the sections for each entry of the outline, and that is what I am working with right now.
My goal is to finish by Friday – I am afraid to say. This would keep me on track to finish by August.
Reference:
Gee, J. P. (2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and methods (2nd. ed.). NY: Routledge.
Labels: data analysis, dissertation writing, Gee's Discouse Analysis
