Categorising emergent themes

Many experts advocate a line-by-line analysis of a transcript (e.g. Charmaz, 2006). However, I feel that a “line” is an arbitrary and unnatural division of discourse, which does not always correspond with a meaningful sense group, and so instead I chose to explore the data on an incident-by-incident basis – what van Manen (2001:94) refers to as a “sententious approach” (in the sense of critical, not censorious) – in which the researcher highlights a participant’s reference to a complete action, emotion or feeling. When any of these actions, emotions or feelings emerged in a transcript, I highlighted the section and made initial exploratory notes on the transcript. Smith et al. (2009) suggest that the transcript is divided into three columns, placing the original text in the centre of the page, with a right-hand column where these initial exploratory notes can be made, as

Transcribed verbatim data Initial exploratory notes

Because in College, the professors, they won’t … won’t just… they just gave me lectures, but they’re not interested in what you’re interested in, or they give you reading materials that’s all up to you and back in China it’s a common thing in Chinese universities. It’s okay if you don’t go to classes, yeah. Unless the teacher would keep a record or something, but people go to class like me, like all of… most of my classmates they go to class, they sit there, but they won’t listen. They just read books, like play with the mobile phones, check their social media, like…

This is what happens in China – is this shared?

Figure 9: Extract of transcript with initial exploratory notes

Once I had transcribed and made initial exploratory notes, I shifted away from the raw verbatim data and began focussing on the exploratory notes. The concepts identified in these notes were crystallised into emergent themes (Smith et al., 2009), which I noted in the left hand column of the transcript. These included both a priori and indigenous themes. An example is given in Figure 10, below, which shows how the initial exploratory notes (“How tutors deal with students’ emotional lives”) is incorporated into a broader emergent theme (“Relationships with tutors):

Emergent themes Transcribed verbatim data Initial exploratory notes

Okay. That’s… wow. You said before that you said your English is improving from when you arrived until, so do you think that in future you will continue to

improve? RELATIONSHIPS WITH

TUTORS

Yeah, I think so, but I think that if I continue to be in a bad mood and not want to talk to anybody, that will not help my English. My… my friends told name, you have to … yeah, my Personal Tutor gave me some interesting advice, he told me he once studied abroad and he know a girl in that country, and his language in that country improved a lot because you have to talk to her every day, so I asked whether he suggest to me to date and English guy and he said, it’s just a suggestion [laughs]

Personal Tutor suggests getting a boyfriend. It sounds like he has no real ability to deal with students’ emotional issues.

Figure 10: Extract of transcript with initial exploratory notes and emergent themes

These emergent themes were then entered on an analytical matrix. Initially, this took the form of an Excel document, which I used to record themes and examples, as exemplified in Figure 11, below:

Evidence of depression Proficiency in English Personal Tutor Educational practices Food and cooking

Tina when it comes to study you have to try to understand what the teacher talking about and try to do the long reading list and sometimes it just make me feel depressed And I just don’t want to talk to anybody even if … I have foreign roommates, and they are kind but at that time I just even don’t want to say hello to them and ask how is you day, yeah, so that was a hard week I have been through

everything is different in in my country and some things really change especially the language

I think the most [complicated] point is language

I have the IELTS test for 7.0 and I... I am beyond the requirement but I still think my English is not that great I think maybe because she stayed in England for a long time so she may get used to studying, staying here, so the language is not as difficult as I

my English is not that good, so I can’t to talk about... talk about some deep things

I told this once to my

Personal Tutor, and I said that his support means a lot to me, and he said that my

confidence should come from myself, from inside.

At the time, no. The whole week, no. After I got through that week, I told to my Personal Tutor and my parents.

And what did your Personal Tutor say?

- He just said… Yeah, he just asked me if I got through it, and I said yes, and he said that’s fine [laughs]

in the seminar I can’t I can’t erm talk well when I am in a group with native speaker or something and sometimes they just talk a joke which I cannot understand what they are talking and that really, really depressed me But when it comes to you have to study and get improvement it’s complicated.

you can practise your cooking skills because I... I really think the most improvement in for these two months is the cooking skills.

I never cooked before, so I can now… now I can try a lot of new dishes

I invite a lot of friends to come here and I cook dishes for them, yeah […] it really make me happy to find out I can do it, yeah, I can do it better and better

I think it’s easier for me to cook than study, and that makes me feel happy and confident, so that’s why I like to do it

However, the amount of data gathered quickly made an Excel document unwieldy. I therefore explored other options for managing large quantities of qualitative interview data, and, as O’Leary (2005) suggests, explored using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS), which allows the researcher to manage large quantities of data by reducing the “multiplicity of meanings” (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000:274) to more manageable quantities: a form of “data distillation” (Ryan & Bernard, 2003:97). I accessed NVivo, which proved to be an excellent “code and retrieve” (Silverman, 2015) database. NVivo allowed me to organise my emergent themes into “nodes” (= categories). A sample of my NVivo coding is given in Figure 12, below:

Figure 12: Sample of NVivo coding

Using NVivo allowed me to explore and experiment with the emergent themes and organise and reorganise them until I felt that they provided credible tentative responses to my research questions. This happened in two ways: firstly, through a process of abstraction (Smith et al., 2009:96), in which I put similar themes together and created a new super-ordinate node, or through subsumption (ibid., p97), in which an existing theme became a node in its own right, with related themes subsumed into it.

4.3 Findings

The analysis and coding discussed in the previous section led to a significant number of themes. These themes in their totality were my findings, which I needed to winnow, since it was not possible to give consideration to all the themes which emerged in the interviews. In this section, I show how I prioritised certain common and notable themes.