Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
5.4 Data Analysis: Methods and Process
5.4.2 Overall Process of Analysis
Data analysis began in August 2008 with the coding that accompanied my data collection. At this stage the purpose of coding was to focus incident sampling during my participant observation in the two research sites (see Section 5.3.1), and to identify topics for follow-up sessions in life story interviews (see Section 5.3.2). The data collection process generated a large amount of written data: 27 life story and depth individual interviews and 85 diary entries in total. My field notes, written in longhand, took me the whole of 2009 to type up, during which time there were very limited coding activities. Transcription of the recorded interviews was done immediately by a research assistant but required substantial corrections. This I did in stages between January 2010 and February 2013 alongside my data analysis and writing of the five publications contained in this thesis, and hence, can be considered an important component of re-immersing myself in the relevant segments of the data (Terre Blanche, Durrheim and Kelly 2006).
The bulk of the coding happened in 2010, after typing up my field notes. As planned, I alternated coding for textual activities, effects, and contexts (Terre Blanche, Durrheim and Kelly 2006), with open, axial, selective coding (Strauss and Corbin 1990; Glaser 1992; Charmaz 2003). This was accompanied by renewed reading in order to aid the interpretation and integration of findings. However, there was limited opportunity to return to the field to obtain additional data, resulting in one of the key limitations of this study – a lack of integration between data collection and analysis as required for the development of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990; Charmaz 2003; see Section 5.7 and Appendix 2.1.1). Instead, I
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returned repeatedly to existing data in order to fill apparent gaps in my emerging analysis. I wrote a number of memos comprising theoretical notes (Strauss and Corbin 1990; Glaser 1992; Charmaz 2003) and began to draw diagrams (Strauss and Corbin 1990), which I found particularly helpful in making sense of the data and in identifying a number of core categories, around which I was able to structure the five publications contained in Part 2 of the thesis (see Section 5.4.3 and Table 5.2).
Also in 2010, I decided to segment the data according to origin into the following overlapping groups with a view to managing the volume of information:
- Research Site One: field notes, interviews with six practitioners of care at the refugee services organisation, and life story interviews with Aliyah and Lance;
- Research Site Two: field notes, interviews with one practitioner of care, Robert, and life story interviews with Émile, Lance, Léocadie and Michelle;
- All life story interviews, including Bola, Sébastien and Timon.
In October 2010, I began focusing on analysing the data from Research Site Two. This was because my engagement with this site had been more extensive, I had developed more prolonged and in-depth relationships with the cross-border migrants at the church, and thus felt more deeply immersed in the data than was the case with the refugee services provider.
Two publications emerged from this analysis: Encountering the Other (Chapter 8) and Reflections on Misframing (Chapter 9). Encountering the Other, which I co-authored with Vivienne Bozalek, draws on data linked to one of the study’s core categories, ‘Encountering (Relating I), and is structured closely along a timeline that emerged from axial coding (see Chapter 8.4 and Appendix 2.1.2). Reflections on Misframing, on the other hand, is structured around two core categories, namely, the notion of ‘Framing’, which I had ‘imported’ into my data analysis from Nancy Fraser’s (2008a) publication, Scales of Justice, and ‘Voice’ which had emerged from my data analysis and fitted well with Fraser’s (2008a) conceptions of
‘participatory parity’ and ‘representation’ (see Chapter 9.3).
As the analysis of the data from Research Site Two progressed, I became concerned that while able to trace the vicious circles of social injustice at play at the church, I remained unable to develop the idea of just practice. For this reason, I returned, in September 2011, to the site and conducted further interviews with practitioners of care at the church. The idea was to sample ‘small openings’ (Zembylas 2008) and to see whether the interviews, in combination
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with my field notes and life story interviews, generated sufficient data to justify a publication dedicated specifically to the kinds of opportunities towards just practice that were available even within a context of deeply entrenched structural processes of injustice. Sadly, time pressures from the beginning of 2009 had escalated, and I thus found myself having to choose between abandoning either this or the planned publication from Research Site One.
Eventually, I opted to forego Small Openings, which would have been my only article to emerge from theoretical sampling.
The article, Dreams (Chapter 6) was an invited contribution towards a special issue on gender and social work in South Africa, which I wrote jointly with Reshma Sathiparsad and Consolée Mujawamariya. This publication is structured around the core category, ‘Surviving’, with particular attention paid to the intersection of migration with gender. However, it is different from the other articles in that it is based on a thematic content analysis (Terre Blanche, Durrheim and Kelly 2006) of two selected life story interviews. During our initial consultations, we agreed that when read alongside one another, Aliyah’s and Michelle’s life stories well illustrated the intersection of gender dynamics and cross-border migration. Following steps outlined by Terre Blanche, Durrheim and Kelly (2006), we developed four themes, coded the data accordingly, selected quotes and jointly worked on the publication, with Reshma focusing on gender and migration, while I selected and applied an appropriate framing for the question of social justice, and Consolée reviewed our findings as a whole, incorporating her own experience and research on the experiences of other refugees in South Africa.
In 2012, I moved on to analysing the data from Research Site One, the refugee services organisation. This publication originated in a discussion I had with Vivienne Bozalek and Michalinos Zembylas about the concept of responsibility, and hence, the article Assuming Responsibility for Justice (Chapter 10) was co-authored by the three of us. It is centred on the core category, ‘Responsibility-taking (Relating II)’. For reasons mentioned in Section 5.3.3 (see also Section 5.5.2 and Chapter 10.3), I decided against including the interviews with practitioners of care. A full audit trail of my analysis of the field notes from Research Site One is included in Appendix 2.2.1. Finally, in 2013, I returned to the life story interviews, corrected the outstanding interviews, analysed the data, reviewed additional literature on cross-border migration and completed the fifth empirical paper included in this study: Subjectivities of Survival (Chapter 7). Like Dreams, this publication is organised around the core category of
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Surviving, exploring, however, the intersection of cross-border migration and class. A detailed audit trail of the data analysis for this publication can be found in Appendix 2.2.2.