Methodology

Claims of knowledge

 * What counts as scientific knowledge?
 * How is it generated?
 * What are the methodology's underlying assumptions regarding the nature of rerality (ontology) & how that reality can be known (epistemology)
 * Disciplines have rhetorical strategies

Finding themes
From Bernard, “Finding Themes”

“Themes come both from data (an inductive approach) and from our prior theoretical understanding of whatever phenomenon we are studying (an a priori, or deductive approach).” p. 55. The authors then detail eight observational techniques, what to look for in the data in order to find themes


 * Repetition – the more often something is repeated in an interview the more likely it is that this theme actually plays a big role for the person speaking
 * Indigenous Typologies or Categories - “Another way to find themes is to look for unfamiliar, local words, and for familiar words that are used in unfamiliar way” p. 57
 * Metaphors and Analogies - “ Analysis, then, becomes the search for metaphors in rhetoric and deducing the schemas, or broad, underlying themes that might produce those metaphors” p. 57
 * Transitions - “Naturally occurring shifts in content may be markers of themes. [...] In speech, pauses, changes in tone of voice, or the presence of particular phrases may indicate transitions and themes.” p. 58
 * Similarities and Differences - “ searching for similarities and differences by making systematic comparisons across units of data.” p. 58, another possibility is to take expressions from one and the same or different participants and asking “How are the expressions different?”, “Degrees of strength in themes may lead to the naming of subthemes.” p. 59
 * Linguistic Connectors - “Look carefully for words and phrases that indicate attributes and various kinds of causal or conditional relations.” p. 60
 * Causal Relations: indicated in the English language by ‘because’ and different variations of because (She is angry because he stood her up)
 * Conditional relation: indicated by ‘if’ and ‘then’ and ‘if-then’ pairs, also by ‘rather than’ and ‘instead of’ (If you go to the gym (then) you will sleep better)
 * Taxonomic Categories: any form of ‘is a’ statement (An dolphin is a mammal) → actual categories, no personal judgment involved)
 * Time-oriented relations: indicated by words like ‘after’, ‘before’, ‘then’ and ‘next’ (After class I usually go home and then I fgo to the library)
 * X-is-Y relations: any sentence that suggesting what something actually is (This guy is a piece of shit) → contains a personal judgment about something
 * Contingent relations: sentences that express that if X then Y follows (If you feel you are getting sick you just drink a lot of hot water with lemon and honey)
 * Spatial relations: sentences focusing on X being close to Y (I really enjoy this neighborhood, it is very family friendly, the kindergarten is close to the park and the supermarket is right nearby as well)
 * Missing Data - “This method works in reverse from typical theme-identification techniques. Instead of asking ‘What Is here?’ we can ask ’What is missing?’” p. 62
 * Theory-Related Material – the aim of studies is always not only to find out how people interact and what they think but also how these ties in to a broader theoretical framework, however, these two aims have to be carefully balanced since “Prior theorizing [...] can inhibit the forming of fresh ideas and the making of surprising connections.”
 * Cutting and Sorting - “cutting and sorting involves identifying quotes or expressions that seem somehow important - these are called exemplars - and then arranging the quotes/expressions into piles of things that go together.” p. 63
 * Word Lists and Key-Word-in-Context Technique - focuses on the words people use, can consist simply of identifying key-words and then letting a text program count how often the word is used in a text
 * Word Co-occurrence - “This approach comes from linguistics and semantic network analysis. It's based on the observation that many words commonly occur with other words to form a particular idea.” p. 66
 * Metacoding - “Metacoding examines the relationship among a priori themes to discover potentially new themes and overarching metathemes. The technique requires a fixed set of data units [...] and a fixed set of a priori themes, so it's less exploratory than many of the techniques we've described. For each data unit, you ask which themes are present and, where appropriate, the direction and strength of each theme. The data are recorded in a unit-by-theme matrix. This matrix can then be analyzed statistically.” p. 66, “Numerical methods like these work best when applied to short, descriptive texts of one or two paragraphs. They tend to produce a limited number of large metathemes, but these are just the kinds of themes that may not be apparent, even after a careful and exhaustive reading of a text.” p. 67

Selecting techniques

 * The kind of data – some techniques such as ‘finding what is missing’ can only be applied to long narratives, other techniques might be suited for lengthy as well as short narratives, some become simply too time consuming for very long interviews such as looking for metaphors (fieldnotes are dangerous because they might just reflect the personal bias of the researcher and not actually present themes)
 * Skill - “Not all techniques are available to everyone. You need to be truly fluent in the language of the text to look for metaphors, linguistic connectors, and indigenous typologies or to spot missing data.” p. 70
 * Labor – some techniques might be very labor intensive and could be made easier without losing quality by helping out with computer based analysis, in other cases computer programs might be more labor-intensive and not suited to the analysis at hand
 * Number of Themes - “In theme discovery, more is better. It's not that all themes are equally important. You still have to decide which themes are most salient and how themes are related to each other. But unless themes are discovered in the first place, none of this additional analysis can take place.” p. 71, “at the start of any project, the primary goal is to discover as many themes as possible. And this means applying several techniques until you reach saturation-that is, until you stop finding new themes.” p. 71
 * Reliability and Validity - “How can we tell if the themes we've identified are _valid? The answer is that there is no ultimate demonstration of validity. The validity of a concept depends on the utility of the device that measures it and on the collective judgment of the scientific community that a construct and its measure are valid “ p. 72, “Reliability; on the other hand, is about agreement among coders and across methods and across studies.” p. 72