CHAPTER 4: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
4.5 Data organization and analysis
4.5.1 Data organization
From the beginning of fieldwork, I kept a log where I wrote down the sites I visited and the activities I participated in daily, as well as the collected data. At the end of my first year of fieldwork, I went over my data and developed a variety of charts to organize what I had collected. I developed tables for youth participants, focal youth and families and Quechua teachers. Tables included the dates of interviews, fieldnotes, audio recordings and artifacts of interest for each participant. In the case of focal youth and youth of interest, I also organized bundles of ethnographic data. That is, I organized key excerpts of fieldnotes and transcripts into individual student files. I began developing my tables inspired by the display matrices and tables suggested by Miles, Huberman and Saldaña (2014), and editing as I saw fit. This exercise was very helpful to get a sense of the data I had collected thus far and what I was missing and wanted to collect during the next months of fieldwork. I also elaborated a general table of collected data, which I updated at the end of my second year of fieldwork, available below.
Table 4 - Organization and quantification of collected data
Events Collected
data
Interviews (Includes recorded and non-recorded events) total 90
Quechua teachers (8 interviewees) 11
Non-Quechua teachers and school staff (6 interviewees) 5
Policymakers (local, regional, national) (4 interviewees) 4
Family members (parents, grandparents, siblings) (19 interviewees) 18
Youth (with 70 youth) 50
Sociolinguistic Surveytotal 353
Inmaculado Corazón School (secondary Years 2-5) 202
Sembrar School (secondary Years 1-5) 151
Classroom participant observation (45 min class periods. Includes audio
and video recorded events) total 252
Quechua classes Inmaculado Corazón School 133
Quechua classes Sembra School 94
Non-Quechua classes Inmaculado Corazón School 14
Non-Quechua classes Sembrar School 11
School observations outside classroom and schoolgrounds (fieldtrips trips, festivals, sport games, after-school workshops, teacher meetings, assemblies. Includes audio and video recorded events) total
91
Inmaculado Corazón School 51
Sembrar School 40
Observations with teachers and Cusco educational actors (Includes
audio and video recorded events) total 41
Local and regional teacher development workshops and events 8
Regional organization meetings 8
Teacher collaboration meetings 25
Family participant observation (homes, family outings, agricultural work.
Includes audio and video recorded events) total 69
Focal family no. 1 – T’ika 22
Focal family no. 2 – Raúl 20
Focal family no. 3 – Daniel 10
Focal family no. 4 - Yesenia 5
Youth participant observation (without parents and teachers. E.g. outings
with the researcher, hanging out sessions, help with homework)total 55
Artifact collection total 183+
Student Quechua class video assignments (film dubbing, autobiographies, theatrical skits)
57
Language maps drawn by youth 17
Videos and photos taken by youth 84
Teacher curriculum documents 10
Policy and official documents 15
Photographs taken during all events hundreds
4.5.2 Data analysis
My analysis followed open and focused qualitative coding strategies (Emerson et al., 2001; Miles et al., 2014), during and after fieldwork and using the ATLAS.ti
software. At the end of my first year of fieldwork I uploaded all the fieldnotes, interview transcripts and audio recording transcripts I had produced into the software and began a close reading of the data set, noting patterns and observations in memos and producing a first set of open codes. I transcribed, at least roughly, all school recordings and most out of school recordings, and hired three assistants to help me transcribe interviews. I then grouped the long list of open codes, which were derived along the lines of emic
categories and theoretical categories, into groupings that reflected bigger themes, often moving codes back and forth between groups in the process and sometimes keeping codes in multiple groups. This analytical process helped me refine my original research questions to the ones I finally decided to pursue. At the end of my second year of fieldwork, I uploaded my new data into the software and continued reading through the
set using the pre-existing codes I had originally developed, as well as creating some new ones.
Following Maxwell (2013), categorizing strategies (mainly coding)as a method of analysis run the risk of fracturing and decontextualizing contextual relationships and experiences within the data, and potentially dismissing discrepant data that doesn’t fit the codes. In order to engage in holistic analysis, I also used connecting strategies for
analysis that allow for the data to be understood “in context, using various methods to
identify the relationships among the different elements of the text” (p. 112). During my readings of fieldnotes and transcripts I selected interesting bits of fieldnotes for later creation of ethnographic vignettes (Erickson, 1986), and continued to group different types of data in individual student files. I also engaged in discourse analysis of selected interview and audio recording transcripts, re-reading event fieldnotes. Because of the volume of my data set, I left out data not directly relevant to my research questions (such as data pertaining to the activities of Cusco-based educational actors, some of the non- Quechua classes, and some interviews with relatives of non-focal youth).
Much of the analysis presented in this dissertation occurred during the writing process, which involved data selection, reading and interpretation. Throughout writing, I attempted to develop assertions well-grounded on the ethnographic data, consider how my positionality informed my data and interpretation, and make room for discrepant data. I went back and forth between general patterns, individual youth’s stories and analytical concepts to respond to my research questions, which was a hefty task. Finally, the different participant roles I took on during this 20 month-long ethnography, the
data collected, and participants’ involvement in different aspects of the data collection and analysis inform the validity of this study (Maxwell, 2004, 2013).