CHAPTER 4.................................................................................................................................................... 58
4.6 Data analysis
must adopt the
phenomenological attitude towards the data-collected
researcher eliminates redundant units of relevant meaning to others previously listed
researcher repeats
procedures 1 through ten.
Also modifying or rewriting the individual summary/ies.
3. Listening to the interview for a sense of the whole: a listening (several times) driven by the value of wanting to get a sense of the whole interview, a gestalt. The researcher is also reminded to suspend all his/her suppositions and/or pre-judgements and enter into the participant‘s world view of the phenomenon
8. Clustering units of relevant meaning: the researcher makes an attempt to determine if any of the units of relevant meaning
naturally cluster together.
In essence, the
researcher establishes whether there seems to be some common theme or essence that unites discrete units of relevant meaning
13. Identifying general &
unique themes for all the interviews: researcher begins a process of looking for the themes common to most or all of the interviews as well as individual
variations. Basically, the researcher identifies general and unique themes that has emerged from all the
interviews
4. Delineating units of general meaning: the reseacher begin the very rigorous process of going over every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph &
noted significant non- verbal communication in the transcript in order to elicit the participant‘s meanings.
9. Determining themes from clusters of
meaning: the reseracher interrogates all the
clusters of meaning to determine if there is one or more central themes which expresses the essence of these clusters
14. Contextualization of themes: after the general and unique themes have been noted, the reseacher place these themes back within the overall contexts or horizons from which they emerged
5. Delineating units of meaning relevant to the research question: the researcher addresses the
10. Writing a summary of each individual interview: return to the interview transcript and
15. Composite summary:
write up a composite summary of all interviews which would accurately
research question to the units of general meaning to determine whether what the participant has said responds to and
illuminates the research question
write up a summary of the interview
incorporating the themes that have been elicited from the data
capture the essence of the phenomenon being
investigated. The summary describes the ‗‗world‘‘ in general, as experienced by the participants.
(Source: Hycner‘s (1985) guidelines for the phenomenological analysis of interview data)
Groenewald adapted the above process outlined by Hycner and instead outlined five critical steps that should be followed in phenomenological explicitation. The five steps or phases are: a). Bracketing and phenomenological reduction; b). Delineating units of meaning; c). Clustering of units of meaning to form themes; d). Summarising each interview, validating it and where necessary modifying it; and, e). Extracting general and unique themes from all the interviews and making a composite summary. The researcher in the present study opted to follow the five steps as elucidated by Groenewald during the process of data analysis. What follows below is a description of each Groenewald‘s five steps, including a brief outline of how the researcher in the present study followed the steps:
4.6.1 Bracketing and phenomenological reduction
During this step the researcher suspends or brackets his/her presuppositions (meanings and interpretations of the phenomena being studied) as much as possible and enters into the world of the unique individual who was interviewed. It means using the matrices of that person's world-view in order to understand the meaning of what that person is saying, rather than what the researcher expects that person to say. Similarly, the researcher in the present study ensured that his presuppositions are bracketed. In this regard, each participant‘s interview, was listened to 4-times by the researcher. The first time was meant to get the general sense and the quality of the interview conducted for each participant. During this process, the interviewer was
able to pick up areas of poor sound quality for each participant, that later required indepth active listening to capture what the participants were expressing. Central to 2nd audio listening, was for the researcher to gain an in depth understanding, especially from the participant‘s vantage point, of their personal experiences of the phenom under investigation.
Following the interviews having been listened to 2-times, the researcher started to transcribe each of the participants‘ interviews. During the transcriptions, the researcher also captured the linguistic, paralinguistic and non-verbal aspects of the interviews. Hycner made a recommendation that during the transcription, the researcher should leave out a large margin on the left side of the page. This was also adopted during interview transcriptions. The space was used later in the process to list all the elicited units of general meaning (Hycner, 1985). Post transcription, all the transcripts were sent to a language specialist for translations (from Sepedi to English). Upon receipt of all the translated interviews, the reseacher embarked on a parallel review process, in which both the Sepedi and English transcripts were reviewed in order to identify any loss of meanings that could have been suffered during the translations. Where loss of meaning was identified, the researcher re-captured the true essence of the statements, by also listening to the original audio interviews once again. Upon the researcher being satisfied that all translated transcripts were a true reflection of the original interviews, the researcher entered the 2nd phase of data-explicitation.
4.6.2 Delineating units of meaning
Delineating is the process in which units of meaning that are identified as having significance in reference to the phenomenon being studied are identified and isolated (Groenewald, 2004; Hycner, 1999; Creswell, 1998). The researcher rigorously enters into a process of going over every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph and noted significant nonverbal communication in the transcript in order to elicit the participant's meanings.
In line with the above guidelines, the researcher in the present study approached each interview with an intention to isolate all units of meanings relevant to the study.
Meanings that were repeated were also included in the listings, on the left side of the page in a textbox. Moustakas (1994) recommends that when listing all units of meaning extracted from each interview, it is wise to numerically code each of them.
This technique was also used in this study. For every participant‘s transcript, all their extracted units of meaning were numerically coded.
4.6.3 Clustering of units of meaning to form themes
During this step, the researcher tries to elicit the essence of meaning of units within the holistic context. In other words, whether there seems to be some common theme or essence that unites several discrete units of relevant meaning. In line with the above process as outlined by Groenewald, the researcher in the present study clustered the relevant units of meaning in line with the study objectives for each study participant. Units of meaning that were repeated or were redundant were eliminated. At this stage it started to emerge that some units of meaning were converging, thus supporting specific themes (i.e. Circumstances surrounding the death, bereavement & grief reactions) for each participant. This procedure was repeated with all transcripts, of which some emerging themes were common among most participant‘s, while a few were peculiar to individual participants‘ transcript.
4.6.4 Summarising each interview, validating and modifying where necessary During this step, each interview is taken and a summary is compiled incorporating all the themes elicited from the data which gives a holistic context. These summaries are then taken by the researcher and conduct a ‗validity check‘; that is, returning to the informant to determine if the essence of the interview has been correctly captured.
In the present study, the researcher developed a holistic integrated summary of each participant‘s interview (See Chapter 5, for summaries of interviews for each participant). Each of the integrated summaries incorporated participant‘s emergent
themes. This was done with caution, so as to retain the essence of the initial interviews conducted and also with a view that each participant should be able to relate with the summary of the interview. Both Hycner and Groenewald emphasise that, as part of offering credibility to the study, upon developing individual summaries for each participant, the researcher must return to the participants for ‗validity-check‘.
For this study 10 of the summaries were emailed to the participant for validity- checks, of which the researcher needed clarity from 2-participants. The researcher subsequently contacted the 2-participants for further clarity. The brief telephonic interview outcomes were incorporated into participant‘s units of relevant meaning and the researcher revised their summaries. Two of the participants were unreachable at the time of validity-checks. The last two validity checks were conducted on a one-to-one basis. In total 12 validity checks were conducted, and the summaries were endorsed by the participants as a true reflection their lived experiences.
4.6.5 Extracting general and unique themes from all the interviews and making a composite summary
According to Sadala and Adorno (2001, p. 289) the researcher, at this point
―transforms participants‘ everyday expressions into expressions appropriate to the scientific discourse supporting the research‖. The researcher concludes the explicitation by writing a composite summary, which must reflect the context or
‗horizon‘ from which the themes emerged. However, care must be taken not to cluster common themes if significant differences exist.
With all summaries validated and the researcher having sought further clarity from 2 of the study participants, the researcher entered into a phase of developing the composite summary for all summaries. The researcher approached this task with a view to identifying the general and unique themes that were identified from all the interviews. The general and unique themes identified, were then written in a language appropriate for the scientific community. Each of the themes retained individual participant‘s numerically coded relevant units of meaning in the form of quotations or excerpts. Under each an every general or unique theme, a number of
individual participant‘s coded quotations were then retained for illustrative purposes (See Chapter 5, study results). This marked the final stage of the data-explicitation process for this study. At this stage all the study objectives were clearly illuminated and the researcher was satisfied that they were scientifically explored and described.