MAPPING THE RESEARCH JOURNEY - MY RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
4.5 Journey and issues of analysing and interpreting career life stories and drawings drawings
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areas, it was not possible to be connected. Even in places such as Kigali City, it could have been difficult for some teachers to find enough time to go to a cyber café to send their self-interviews. Hence, it could reduce the number of participants. In addition, by using the internet, they could use pseudonyms whereas I had to merge the self-interview with the first face-to-face interview during my analysis.
Self-interviews were not extensively used by the participants. However, the participants mainly used self-interview to write some teaching scenes to show how their teaching methods were applied. Moreover, one participant estimated that he had given enough information and found no reason to commit himself to do a self- interview. This could be considered as an avoidance of continuing talking about sensitive issues. Another reason which weakened the success of self-interviews was the lack of proper channels to send the feedback to the researcher without identifying the sender. The anonymity was not possible because I had to relate the self-interview to the formal interview for a better understanding of the phenomenon under study.
4.5 Journey and issues of analysing and interpreting career life stories and
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disorganised and necessitated logical analysis. After transcribing recorded oral texts and transforming them into written texts drawings were put in a separate chapter as they were different from other data because they presented deep emotions about the research topic and revealed some insights I could not otherwise access (Banks, 2007). As discussed in the next subsection, the drawings were analysed through semiotic analysis (Cullum-Swan & Manning, 1994; Sebeok, 2001). Drawings were accompanied by additional explanatory texts made by the participants and the drawing analysis necessitated a different approach from other verbal texts. These verbal texts were used to construct career life stories. In the next subsection, I explain how the drawings were analysed.
As there is no common understanding on how to proceed in the process of analysing qualitative data including career life stories (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Patton, 2002;
Schurink et al., 2011; Silverman, 1993), I did my best to design strategies to construct the career life stories. In this section, I explain the process of constructing career life stories used in this research. Alongside the construction of career life stories, the blueprint of the constructed career life stories is extensively expounded.
The construction of stories was the first level analysis of verbal texts. Thereafter, open coding was employed for the second level analysis of career life stories.
Referring to Connelly and Clandinin (1990, p.7), “the language and criteria for conduct of narrative inquiry are under development in the research community”.
Therefore, I had to be innovative in the construction of career life stories.
4.5.1 Drawings analysis
In the fifth chapter, I employed semiotic analysis to analyse the drawings (Johnson &
Christensen, 2008). Etymologically, semiotics derives from the Greek word, semeiotics, as a branch of medicine which studies physiological symptoms. A symptom is a mark or sign that stands for something other than itself. The role of the physician is to unravel what a symptom stands for (Sebeok, 2001). Conceptually, semiotics is concerned with signs and what they stand for in a human culture (Berger, 2004; Gottdiener, 1985; Sebeok, 2001). A sign can be a photograph, a drawing, a gesture or a word. In this research, I was focusing on the meanings of drawings considered as signs at this stage of my study. Aristotle (as quoted by Sebeok, 2001) identified three simultaneous dimensions of any sign namely the
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physical part of the sign (the sound), the referent to which it refers and its evocation meaning what the referent entails psychologically and socially. In other words, the sign is made of the signifier and the image or concept to which the signifier refers, called the signified. Signification is the relation between the two (Parsa, 2004). For instance, the red light is a signifier or the word that refers to signified as information meaning do not pass this area.
With the visual analysis approach, I took into consideration three species of signs namely icon, index and symbol. Firstly, the icon refers to a sign that expresses direct or real meaning. This explanation means that an icon is a reproduction of what it stands for and physically the icon resembles or simulates what it represents. For instance, photographs are iconic signs because they visually reproduce their referent. Secondly, an index that supposes “a relationship that it establishes with its object, is an indicator determined by this object” (Türkcan, 2013, p.601). Sensory features help to determine the indexical meaning. For instance, dark clouds are index of an impending rain or the pointing of an index finger indicates the location of people, things or events. The symbol is the third type of signs. The symbolic meaning is known through convention because the symbolic sign stands for its referent in an arbitrary way. For instance, the cross is a sign of Christianity. Even words are symbolic signs (Berger, 2004; Parsa, 2004; Sebeok, 2001; Türkcan, 2013). Thus, the meaning of signs can differ from location and time.
As signs can mean different things depending on time and place, the drawings used in this research were analysed and interpreted according to the Rwandan culture and according to my own personal background as described in the General introduction. Thus, visual semiotic analysis looks at denotative and connotative meanings of a drawing or any other sign (Berger, 2004; Parsa, 2004). By denotation, I looked at the literal meaning or the initial referent a sign intends to convey whereas by the connotation I was more interested in associative meanings for the sign which the sign is possible to create (Hall, 1993; Sebeok, 2001). In other words, the connotation meaning depends on my cultural experiences. In this regard, “word’s connotation involve the symbolic, historic, and emotional matters connected to it”
(Berger, 2004, p.16).
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Alongside symbolic or connotative meaning of the drawing, my analysis took into account the iconic meaning and indexical meaning. In this perspective, two most important aspects of the drawing namely the representation of the drawing (signifier) and the meaning of the drawing (the signified) were used as an analytical tool.
Sign Sample
Signifiers Signified
Table 4.1 Drawing analysis inspired by Parsa (2004).
As Parsa (2004, p.844) observes, “the significant exception of Peirce’s categories of
‘index’, ‘icon’, and ‘symbol’, it [semiotics] suffers from an underdeveloped system of descriptive and analytical categories”. In order to alleviate this lack, a series of concepts based on the theoretical and conceptual ideas and research questions were also taken into consideration to analyse the drawings:
hard experience
normal experience
teaching aims
stated commitment
risk taking
avoiding
peace building
neutrality
indoctrination
teaching methods
The a priori codes were used “to replicate or extend a certain line of previous research” (Johnson & Christensen, 2008, p.534). In this research, the designed codes helped to think about the use of visual methods in line with controversial issues theory.
The drawing analysis also took into consideration the participants’ descriptions to avoid misinterpretation. The participants were allowed to “analyse” the drawings and I recorded their results. In other words, the drawings were considered as the data
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and the participants were analysts. The participants’ descriptions were considered as primary results. Later, I interpreted the participants’ descriptions further as I did for the stories in 4.5.2 through open coding (Johnson & Christensen, 2008). I preferred to give details of the use of open coding because it was largely used to construct career life stories.
4.5.2 Career life stories construction through open coding
In qualitative research, data analysis starts early during data gathering. I gathered the data, analysed it mainly during the transcription process and looked for additional data. This interim analysis done during the process of gathering data helped me to ask more questions to the participants during different meetings and have a deep understanding of the topic (Johnson & Christensen, 2008). In the case of this research, I have chosen to use first career life stories as first level analysis. By career life stories, each participant’s story is presented as a whole. In their book, Cohen et al. (2011) explain a range of strategies for presenting gathered data. When the responses of one individual are presented before moving to the next one, the coherence of the individual’s data is maintained and the participant’s text is seen as a whole. In the particular case of this research, I presented career life stories in a coherent text without necessarily taking into consideration the order of the interview schedule as discussed below. For the second level analysis, open coding was used in view of thematic analysis. The objective of this thematic analysis was to compare key ideas from all participants. In other words, the focus was put on main aspects emerging from the data.
For this research, after the transcription of the interviews, the data was systematically analysed to get manageable and understandable units. I obtained manageable units by fracturing data in segments through categorisation.
Categorising refers to two main activities namely coding and organising data (Chang, 2008). By coding, I ascribed a label to a piece of data or “chunks’ of varying size”
(Johnson & Christensen, 2008, p.534). The assigned label was either my creation or was picked from the text and allocated to analytical units when I found a suitable label in the participant’s text. In general, this inductive coding was descriptive and one or more codes could be ascribed to a piece of data due to the width and content of the piece (Cohen et al., 2011; Merriam, 2009).