Analysing and interpreting data

Interpretive analysis is iterative, moving forward step by step as the research process ‘talks back’ and gives indications of what to do next. In this study, analysis runs all the way through the research project and has been performed in several stages or overlapping ‘rounds’. Although the manuscript has been written so as to provide the reader with an ordered report of the different forms of knowledge that contributed to the understandings and conclusions of the study, a closer look at the research process shows that interpretation has been both concurrent and sequential. The classic structure of a research paper suggests, for example, that literature reviews are completed before field work and interpretation undertaken only after the field work is done. Yanow and Schwartz-Shea (2014) remark that participatory action research and case study are among the methods in which it is often difficult to separate the processes of generating and analysing data. In addition, analytic activities are not only performed on data but also on readings and on one’s own thinking (p. 158). This study is an example of how commitment to what is significant to participants and attention to deepening understandings can require a layered approach with cyclic revisits to several ‘stages’ of research: literature reviews, mapping of the research context, and interpretations about interpretations.

Five partly overlapping rounds of analysis were undertaken and will be described here with their characteristic stances and methods, and with some examples provided.

The first round of analysis and interpretation was carried out ‘in real time’ during each group meeting, as described in 4.2. What the teachers and the researcher chose to bring to the conversation and focus on session by session was seen as initial selection, synthesis and interpretation of empirical material. Comments and interpretations about each case were offered by both participants and researcher, but they were always nuanced, commented on and sometimes discarded by the teacher who was presenting a case, as in the following dialogue about finding the right frequency and ambition for group rehearsals:

Teacher 2: I think that if you had this terrible intensity and rehearsed every week, it would become such a terrible routine...

Teacher 1: Mm.

Teacher 2: ...that you might get tired of this...joy.

Teacher 1: No, no, you don’t get tired even though you rehearse once a week. You don’t . . . But in order to become a professional group and start touring more exten- sively, we would have to sacrifice family [life] and this ordinary life, too. And I don’t think anyone of us would be willing to do that. So I guess this will have to do. Typical interventions by the researcher were formulated as suggestions followed by a question: ”This is how I understand what you are saying; what do you think?”; ”Some researchers have thought that . . . does that make sense to you?”

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The second round of analysis and interpretation was carried out during the work with transcriptions. Since large parts of the transcribing were completed between group sessions, it was possible to perform analysis both during deskwork and in reflective conversations. As remarked by Kvale and Brinkmann (2009, pp. 184– 186), transcribing itself is an interpretive process which is influenced by the researcher’s meaning-making; the ambition during this stage was to weave my own interpretive work together with the interpretive work of the teachers. I noted the larger themes that the participants wanted to work on and presented them back to the participants in concentrated form. In addition, expressions that were used frequently were noted and discussed. Interventions were often formulated as in the following examples: “Last time, you spoke about your intention to work with different singing genres and techniques. What are your thoughts now, and what is in focus for you at this point? How would you like to proceed with your questions?” and “Something I noticed while I was transcribing was that you frequently talked about ‘having fun’. I am wondering if you might want to say some more about what ‘having fun’ means to you”.

The third round took place during final transcribing after group sessions were completed and during individual, semi-structured follow-up interviews with every teacher. I prepared questions about content and meanings in previous data both for clarification and for collaborative interpretive work. The place in which the interviews were conducted (in the teacher’s home or classroom according to his or her choice) was taken into account: what the teachers said about the environment and what the researcher noticed during the visit added a new dimension to analysis. Interviews were about one hour long. In addition to questions about the teacher’s professional biography, typical questions included: “It’s been some time since we met; where are you at now, what are your thoughts about the project, what current situation is important for you?”, “This is what I have been thinking, feeling and noticing as I listened to and transcribed our conversations; would you like to say something about that?” and “This is how I understand what you said at the time; what do you think about it now?” Already during the group sessions, the complexity of the aspirations and challenges described by the teachers had made me realise that casting my reports about their work in simple linear narratives would not do justice to the understandings that emerged. Stories about decision-making and solving of practical dilemmas had been told, but there was much more to what the teachers wanted to accomplish, and their reflections seemed far-reaching and sophisticated. During the final transcribing process, as life history data entered the composition, this impression grew even stronger. In order to engage with the increasing complexity and place the teachers’ concerns in a broader conversation, I made the choice of reworking the literature review, taking it into a more philosophical direction. Previous studies about music school teaching and analysis of larger discussions about the value and purpose of music education were juxtaposed and considered together. In addition, the initial plan of ‘writing up’ narratives of the issues presented by the participants no longer

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seemed rigorous enough. What the teachers described as significant ranged from the way lesson notebooks were handled to the order in which students performed at concerts, and each such description carried aspirations of its own, connected to larger aims.

At this point, methodological support for further analysis was found in an area that might initially seem somewhat tangential to music education; namely, interpretive policy analysis as described by Yanow (2000). I found common ground between robust praxialism and its commitment “to have what people actually say and do drive philosophical inquiry into the central concepts, actions, social and political factors, values, goods, and harms of musical practice”110 and the commitment in policy analysis to listen to understandings emerging from policy-relevant interpretive communities. In addition, Yanow’s parallel interest in practice-based approaches as well as researcher and practitioner reflexivity (see e.g. Nicolini, Gherardi, & Yanow, 2003; Miettinen, Samra-Fredericks, & Yanow, 2009) facilitated my own bridging between music education research and interpretive analysis of practices. For example, the study by Cook and Yanow (2011) on flute-making and the studies by Strati (2003, 2007) on the ‘feel’ developed by workers in sawmills and on house roofs cast new light on the empirical material in the present study and confirmed the relevance of looking for ‘goodness’ and ‘meaning’ as described and aimed for by the participants. This theoretical synthesis led to the most demanding part of deskwork, which was conducted by combining the previously constructed heuristic map of values and goods generally strived for in music education (2.2) with a modified version of interpretive police analysis as described by Yanow (2000) and using these as an analytical grid, bound together by the overarching orientation towards robust praxialism.

The fourth round of analysis, then, completed what might now be called

interpretive practice analysis. In interpretive policy analysis, ‘data’ consist of

“the words, symbolic objects, and acts of policy-relevant actors along with policy texts, plus the meanings (values, beliefs, feelings) these artifacts have for them” (Yanow, 2000, p. 27). Using these categories as starting points and extending them after discussion with Yanow, I searched the empirical material for references to what participants seemed to emphasise as meaningful or good by means of (1) using words that signal aspiration, approval, or disapproval, (2) handling an artefact in a particular way or describing the handling of an artefact in a particular way, (3) performing or describing an act, (4) producing or referring to musical sounds or qualities, (5) referring to persons, and (6) telling stories, including references to outer and inner conversations.

Following Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2014), I attended to stories in order to ground interpretations in “people’s understandings of their own contexts”, allowing for “interpretations on interpretations” (p. 352). Stories may of course

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contain elements from all the previous categories, but during the analysis, I looked for verbal cues that signalled telling of a story or anecdote, for example: “I have to tell you about this time when a student...”, or “I remember that when the new curriculum came, we had a meeting about it. And one of my colleagues said...” (referring to outer conversation), or “Sometimes, I wanted to push the students a bit more. But you can’t drive until it all crashes. So then I thought: ok, let’s slow down a bit...” (referring to inner conversation).111

Transcripts were analysed in order to identify meanings conveyed in any of the six ways mentioned above. Particular attention was given to statements which involved aspirations such as “I want the students to have the opportunity to...”; appraisals such as “that is good” or “it is very important”, accounts of issues that participants described as tension-ridden or conflictual, and accounts of the ways in which challenges were handled. The ever-present risk of drowning in data was reduced by limiting the report to references to the inquiries chosen by the participants. Strong shared themes were noted separately and will be discussed in a section of their own.

During the fifth round, the research report was written on the basis of the previous rounds of analysis and interpretation, blending voices from the project with author narrative in ‘stories from practice development’ (chapter 5).112 Organising the data in this way added an interpretive phase of choosing what to report and how, editing, and making decisions about what words and phrasings to use and what I would leave outside of the report. Although the purpose has been to form meaningful and nuanced wholes, there is not necessarily a systematic configuration of stories as “plots”, as described by Polkinghorne (1988, 1995). Instead, the aspirations and challenges of each teacher’s practice are illustrated by several stories, excerpts from conversations, comments from other persons, and reporting or commentary by the researcher. All five rounds of analysis are embedded in the stories from teacher practices and all participants have become voices in each other’s stories and in the report from collaborative inquiry.

Participants had spoken mostly Swedish and some Finnish during the project; I made all translations to English, trusting that by this time, my understanding of

111 _{In the reports from sessions and interviews, double quotation marks are used when}

participants or the researcher cite what they or someone else has said. Single quotation marks are occasionally used for citations within citations when there is a risk of confu- sion, but also to signal inner conversation, imagined conversation, a sense of ‘so to speak’, or expressions that are not used as the speaker would normally use them.

112 _{The ‘stories’ in the final reports are not identical with the stories I looked for in the}

data. They are constructed from all types of references, statements, and accounts noted during the fourth round of analysis. For similar approaches to reporting from teacher- researcher collaborations, see e.g. McLaughlin, Black-Hawkins, Brindley, McIntyre and Taber (2006): Researching schools. Stories from a schools-university partnership for

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the teachers’ aspirations and concerns was sufficient to convey and interpret what the teachers had pointed out as important. Minor errors were corrected following member checking processes. Finally, in these last analyses, three perspectives were integrated: robust praxialism (2.2), beliefs about music education and the good life and their connections to music school policy (2.3 and 2.4), and the concept of ‘creating conditions for a good relationship to music’ (2.5 and 2.6). A concentrated version of the research questions was then used: what does ‘goodness’ in relation to music mean to the music school teachers in this project and how do they strive for it? At this point, it also became possible to form a deeper understanding of both aspirations and challenges in the teachers’ work and of how the different reference points from the fourth round were set in ‘complex conversation’ with each other.

The research report includes both narratives written by the researcher and descriptions of teacher inquiries, and shares certain features with reports from studies that build more systematically on narrative approaches, action research, or case study research. This study is not purely representative of either of those traditions, but is committed to the characteristics of interpretive analysis: iteration, contextualising, dialogue, abductive logic, and aiming for substantive insight.