The process of data interpretation and analysis began during the fieldwork and continued well beyond it. The analysis of the data was also part and parcel of transcription, coding and write-up. As Ely et al. (1997: 140) argue:
6 However, as Ansell (2000: 112) points out, story-writing leaves little scope to create ‘oppositional knowledge for consumption in the field and relies on relationships that reproduce dominant discourses’ that could not be contested through discussions.
Qualitative research involves almost continuous and certainly progressive data analysis from the very beginning of data collection. This process of analysis guides the researcher to focus and refocus observational and/or interview lenses, to phrase and rephrase research questions, to establish and check emergent hunches, trends, insights, ideas to face oneself as a research instrument.
From the point of view of myself and the research subjects, I saw data interpretation as involving a two-stage process. First, the participants attempted to interpret the reality of their lives through both oral (interviews and focus-groups) and written language (story writing).
Secondly, I tried to interpret their interpretation and link that up with my own knowledge field logs and analysis of the context. As Clark (2007) argues, in this way, I saw myself as a co-interpreter rather than a sole co-interpreter of data, the material produced being the result of subjective interpretations between myself and the research subjects (Ansell, 2001). It is perhaps significant that my experiences of growing up in contexts similar to those of the children I worked with (for example, in terms of performing different chores and earning an income) provided me with the advantage of being able to relate to their realities and gave me an added ability to understand the subtleties of their lives. However, there is a stage of data analysis which is ‘somewhat different as it takes place when the researcher has left the field and sits’ (Ely et al., 1997: 40). In the following section, I will discuss how this stage of interpretation and analysis was carried out.
Transcription and categorisation
After the fieldwork, I made an inventory of the materials I had collected. After that, all the interviews and focus-group discussions, which were conducted in Amharic, were transcribed verbatim by a research assistant. Because I was flexible and open during fieldwork, I was overwhelmed by the large mass of data I gathered. At some point, I felt I had far too much material compared to what I could really use. However, I overcame this problem by cataloguing them according to themes. Fuller and Petch (1995: 85) describe this important task of data analysis as one which involves reducing ‘the initial mountain of data to an ordered set of themes’. Application of this task to my work produced categories that reflect the focus of the articles and the content of the materials I gathered. From these categories, I decided to focus on aspects of the data that pertain to children’s livelihoods and lives in the
context of HIV/AIDS. This technique was instrumental in unpacking a great deal of material, and it permitted the remainder to be stored away for future use.
Coding
I coded the data by identifying them with specific labels and concepts for further analysis. I did this by re-reading the stories and transcriptions line-by-line and highlighting key words and phrases using a colour highlighter. Then, I ‘read across’ the whole material looking for similarities and differences, patterns and consistencies, ambiguities and contradictions among the various participants’ responses. While doing this, I also identified connections throughout the material, a process Strauss and Corbin (2005: 290) refer to as ‘axial coding’. This process was followed by a varying degree of abstraction of concepts based on the participants’ own words and phrases. While I was analysing the data from the first fieldwork, the material from the second fieldwork was also being transcribed and coded. Likewise, the material on which some of the articles were based was, at the time of drafting, still in process of being collected.
In this way, the process of data collection and interpretation was partly guided by the focus of the individual articles. This back-and-forth process supports Marshal and Rossman’s (1995) argument that data collection and interpretation go hand in hand to promote the emergence of substantive concepts and theory grounded in empirical data (see also Jackson, 2001; Strauss, 2005).
Analysis and write-up
The interpretation of compositions and transcripts was carried out simultaneously and relatively speaking in the same fashion. After I had identified central lines of analysis using the key phrases, I explored the consistency and deviations of the various emergent categories.
Eventually, the stories and transcripts that were found to be generally ‘representative’ – in terms of being able to reflect the main trends in the data – through which I could illustrate specific aspects of the children’s lives, were fully translated into English (see example – Figure 4 below). The remaining transcriptions and stories were presented contextually. In these cases, I coded the concepts alongside the original material and wrote a summary of each in English at the end of the Amharic text.
As part of data analysis, I tabulated some of the qualitative data by classifying emerging themes in order to identify patterns. This was especially the case for compositions written by the children on the kinds of work they engage in and my own observations of recurrent phenomena, as well as identification of the characteristics of extended family households that look after orphans etc. Whereas this approach generally eliminates ‘deviant voices’ – which, as is done in this thesis, could be nuanced further in the discussion – it offered me the possibility to associate the transcribed data with other material (like field notes), as well as interpretation of general trends and scenarios in making sense of my qualitative data.
Figure 4. ‘My daily activities’
During the writing-up process, I repeatedly returned to the highlighted transcripts and referred to my English summaries. I also read my field notes and made a review of literature on the study areas in order to situate my research in its social, cultural and economic contexts. I believe that the opportunities I had to co-write articles with my supervisors, who also joined me in the field during its different stages, have helped me in bringing different perspectives to bear on the same material. Their probing comments on my interpretation and questions on my taken-for-granted knowledge at times led me to re-read my field notes, listen to the tapes again, and try to remember the setting and context in which the particular words and phrases had been uttered.