DEDICATION
3.4 Data analysis
65
66 seeing plausibility - trying to make good sense of data, using informed intuition to reach a conclusion, clustering - setting items into categories, types, behaviours and classifications; and finally, making conceptual/theoretical coherence - moving from metaphors to constructs, to theories, and to explaining the phenomena.
According to Cohen et al. (2007, p. 461) “there is no one single or correct way to analyse and present qualitative data; how one does it should abide by the issue, fitness for purpose, that is, the researcher must be clear what he or she wants the data analysis to do as this will determine the kind of analysis that is undertaken”. This can include describing, discovering patterns or generating themes. The significance of deciding the purpose is that it will determine the kind of analysis performed on the data, and this will influence the way in which the analysis is written up.
In researching the learners, the focus was consistently on their diverse backgrounds and the impact this has or has not had on their sporting achievement. Further, it provided a deeper understanding of how these learners have negotiated the spaces in the transforming society to achieve their goals. After capturing the data of the learners from the in-depth interviews, portraits and essays, I presented the data by narrating their stories one at a time. Storytelling is integral to this research.
Narrative inquiry has been considered as a way of understanding, organising and communicating experiences as stories are lived and told. Within the inquiry field, stories are lived and the experiences related as stories. The stories are modified when retold and relived. McEwan and Egan (1995) state that narratives are important because stories form the intellectual and practical nourishment of oral cultures - to the extent that our modern literate culture retains oral practices. Through storytelling, individuals are able to learn to express themselves and make sense and logic of the external world. Narrative inquiry, as a way of making sense of human life and the world, has been studied through various approaches. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) refer to narrative inquiry as a research method where, because experience happens narratively, it should be studied narratively.
67 Storytelling as a particular form of narrative inquiry will bring with it special features of the individuals’ thinking, as it is an important way of recognising, interpreting, and constructing interaction between people and society (Heo, 2004). As a method of knowing and understanding, narratives capture the richness and variety of meaning in humanity and effectively communicate who we are, what we do, how we feel, and why we ought to follow a certain course of action. A narrative involves facts, ideas, theories, and dreams from the perspectives and in the context of someone’s life. Individuals think, interpret, perceive, imagine, interact and make some decisions according to narrative elements and structures. Within narrative inquiry, storytelling seeks to better understand the why behind human action. Story collecting as a form of narrative inquiry enables the research participants to express the data in their own words and reveal the latent why behind their declarations and assertions (Lyons & LaBoskey, 2002).
According to Dewey (1938), educative experience is liberating and uniting as it opens the continuous path of reconstructing and recreating the habituated meanings of the world and enduring attitudes of the self. An educative experience is built through an individual’s continuous reconstruction by moving from past and present to future experience, and involves the tensional transaction between internal conditions of the individual and his social world. Each individual reconstructs the periods, phases, or levels of growth of human mentality. Storytelling as a characteristic of human experience of the world has a temporal context, a spatial context, and the context of other people. According to Bruner (1990), a story must simultaneously construct two landscapes: the outer landscape of action, and the inner one of thought and intention.
The stories told in this study will endevour to describe vividly each learner’s thoughts and intentions, and succinctly indicate how they maneuver themselves within a divided landscape to excel in sport.
Narrative is a fundamental feature of meaning creation and construction, which is a negotiated activity that begins in early childhood and characterises the entire human life (Fusai, Saudelli, Marti, Decortis, & Rizzo, 2003). Human life is filled with narrative fragments, enacted in and reflected upon storied moments of time and space. Narrative thinking is a vital form of experience and a significant way of acting upon reality.
Storytelling provides individuals with a means to understand narrative in a social
68 context, and to clarify and elucidate their own thinking. According to Packer (1991), narratives are a distinctive mode of reporting one’s experiences of the world.
This thesis constitutes 15 learners’ stories: patchwork quilts, with selected pieces of conversation sewn together to create narratives. These narratives are derivatives of a single interview with each learner. Verbatim responses, used in qualitative studies (Ball, 1990; Bowe, Ball, & Gold, 1992), were used extensively in narration of the learners’
stories. It was important to be faithful to the exact words used by the learners in order to capture the essence of what they were saying. The learners in the study are the foundational informers, and to alleviate any form of distortion it was imperative to quote them verbatim. This also gave the sense of relating to the learner on a personal basis.
Four of the narrated stories of learners, together with their drawing and an essay written about themselves (Appendix 7) were assessed by Professor Srinivasan S. Pillay, Managing Director and Assistant Clinical Professor at the Harvard Medical School and Chief Executive Officer of NeuroBusiness Group. He is the author of the books Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear, Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders, and The Science behind the Law of Attraction. His professional assessment is given at the end of each of the four stories (of Yamka, Brendon, Nkosi and Jemma) in Chapter Four.
Narration of the learners’ stories made possible the identification of emerging themes, which are analysed in Chapter Five. The following five themes emerged: sporting excellence, self and identity; sporting excellence and the social context; sporting excellence, schooling and the curriculum; sporting excellence, team spirit and talent search; and finally sporting excellence, race, class and culture. Using and then amalgamating key themes emerging across each of the learner’s stories, the data generated through in-depth interviews with the provincial coaches and the significant others were analysed to inform the notions generated (Chapter Six). Structuring the themes for the study, Figure 1: p 44 was used to organise the psychological profiles of the learners and Figure 2: p 49, was used to organise the sociological aspects of sporting excellence. These two analytical frameworks in turn provided support for ordering of
69 the emerging themes of the study. The emerging themes set the platform for theorising sporting excellence in a transforming society in Chapter Seven.