An event listing is a matrix that arranges a series of concrete events by chronological time periods, sorting them into several categories (see Display 8.1).
Applications
Qualitative researchers are always interested in events—what they are, when they happened, and what their connections to other events are (or were)—to preserve chronology and illuminate the processes occurring. A process, after all, is essentially a string of coherently related events.
Typically, these interests lead to the production of an extended narrative arranged in a proper time sequence (usually without flashbacks or flash forwards).
Narratives are indispensable if we are to understand a complex chronology in its full richness.
The problem is that going straight to an extended narrative from written-up field notes runs an acute risk: You can tell a story that is partial, biased, or dead wrong—even though it may look vivid, coherent, and plausible to a reader. The event listing is a good way of guarding against false chronologies. It creates a matrix-based outline for your narrative.
Example
In the school improvement study, we (Miles and Huberman) wanted to display events during the adoption and implementation of an innovation at the school level, showing them by different phases or time periods of the process.
Keeping the classic left-to-right convention for the passage of time, we might make columns of the matrix list successive time periods. These could be defined arbitrarily (e.g., Year 1, Year 2), or more organically by empirically derived phases or stages of the adoption-implementation process.
Perhaps some events are more critical than others, serving to cause new events or to move the
process forward into a new phase. Rows of the matrix, in this case, deal with the locale of events:
state, district, and local levels.
Display 8.1 shows how this technique worked out for a 1970s innovation called SCORE-ON, a laboratory for teaching remedial math and reading skills to children “pulled out” of their regular classes. The time periods (Contextual Press 1976–1978, Emergence of the Problem Oct. 1978, etc.) were initially defined conceptually from a general adoption-implementation model, but labels for each period came from the actual core activities during that period. A new time period was defined when a significant shift in activities occurred. The analyst marked “barometric events” (those that moved the process on into the next time period or phase) with an asterisk.
The analyst focused mainly on Smithson School (bottom row) and wanted to have that as the most local of the locales. However, the innovation was also implemented in other schools (next row up).
And events could be sorted into district and state/macro levels, which, in turn, influenced the lower levels.
An exploratory interview question asked people to describe the history of the innovation (“Can you tell me how SCORE-ON got started in this school?”). Follow-up probes fleshed out the sequence from innovation awareness to adoption, how and by whom key decisions were made and the reasons involved. Other questions dealt with outside agencies and events and “anything else defined an event as a specific action or occurrence mentioned by any respondent and not denied by anyone else. If at least two people said the event was important, crucial, or “made a big difference”
to what happened subsequently, an asterisk was assigned to designate it as a “barometric event.”
Analysis
A quick scan across the display shows us that the process of change is strikingly rapid. A problem seen in one elementary school in the fall of 1978 by the fourth-grade teachers apparently leads to the discovery and introduction of an innovation (SCORE-ON) that was in place in five district schools by the fall of 1979.
A look at the asterisks helps explain some of the speed: the active involvement of central office officials after they saw the innovation at an awareness fair, leading to justificatory events such as the pupil folder screening and to specific school-level planning and the appointment of specific teachers to manage the remedial laboratory. State-level competency requirements were the backdrop, and the teachers’ report of problems was probably an alarm or trigger that set off actions already fueled by concern at the district level about meeting state requirements.
When we note the repercussions of an externally driven budget crisis during the latter school year (September 1979–May 1980), we can infer that the original availability of Title I funds might have played a strong part in the original changes.
These are plausible hunches about the meaning of the data in Display 8.1. To check them out, the analyst can piece together a focused narrative that ties together the different streams into a meaningful account, a narrative that could only with difficulty have been assembled—or understood—from the diverse accounts spread through the field notes. Here are some excerpts from the focused narrative the analyst produced. They should be read in conjunction with Display 8.1:
A special impetus was given in the fall of 1978, when the six fourth-grade teachers at Smithson noticed that they had an unusually large cohort (40) of incoming pupils who were one or more grade levels behind in reading achievement. . . . Thirty-eight of these forty had come out of the [existing] FACILE program in the first to third grades. It is not clear how so many of these pupils got to the fourth grade, but no one was surprised. . . .
The teachers were worried that either promoting or retaining so many pupils would cause problems; they were leaning
toward retention, but feared a massive protest by parents. Essentially, they were covering themselves by announcing early in the year that they had inherited, not created, the problem. . . .
During this phase, a circular announcing Federal funding . . . came to the central office from the State superintendent. An awareness conference, presenting a series of projects, many of them keyed to remedial skill development, was to take place nearby. At Mrs. Bauers’ initiative—and with an eye to a solution for the problem at Smithson School—a contingent from the central office (Mrs. Bauers, Mrs. Robeson, Mr. Rivers) attended the presentations and was attracted to SCORE-ON. It seemed a relatively flexible program, easy to integrate into the school in pull-out form. It was directed specifically to the bottom quartile in reading and math.
Note several things here: (a) the narrative, which is both straightforwardly descriptive and analytic, helps knit together and flesh out events at different levels of the chart, (b) the analyst can add explanatory conditions or states that show how one event led to another, (c) the return to the field notes often turns up other critical events or supporting information not originally in the display, and (d) the narrative is more understandable when read in conjunction with the display, and vice versa.
When the first version of the display is filled in, start a draft of a focused narrative. That step will require you to return to the field notes as you go. Stay open to the idea of adding new events to the listing or subtracting events that seem trivial or irrelevant.
For a careful reconstruction, the events in a listing can be dated within cells. Time periods can be specified much more narrowly or cover a very brief time span (e.g., 1 hour in a classroom). Events from a listing also can be shown as a network-like flow that includes more general states or conditions, such as “lack of enthusiasm” (see “Event–State Network” later in this chapter).
Barometric or significant events in cells can be color coded in red to highlight their importance during the at-a-glance review.
The problems we face in understanding event flows are those of sorting out the different domains of events, preserving the sequence, showing the salience or significance of preceding events for following events—and doing all of this in an easily visible display that lets us construct a valid chronology. The event listing helps ground the analyst’s understanding of a complex flow of events, especially for longitudinal qualitative studies, and increases confidence in the associated chronological account. It also lays the basis for the beginnings of a causal analysis: what events led to what further events and what mechanisms underlay those associations (see Chapter 9).
Notes
Event listings can be limited much more sharply to “critical incidents,” defined as important or crucial, and/or limited to an immediate setting or compressed time frame. These matrices can be done at many different levels of detail, but keep the rows to a maximum of four or five levels, and be sure they represent a meaningfully differentiated set of categories. Do not go finer than the study questions dictate.
Even more selectively, events can be shown as a flow limited to an individual’s major events, each demarcated and connected with the causal pushes that may have moved the process from one event to another. Display 8.2 shows a diagram adapted from display work models by Pillet (personal communication, 1983).
The case here is one of Saldaña’s (1998, 2003, 2008a) longitudinal qualitative studies of a young man from kindergarten through his late 20s. The successive Educational and Occupational experiences are indicated in the left column; at the right, we see the researcher’s summary of the Personal major crises and forces moving concurrently throughout the education and work history of the case studied. The researcher uses this not just as an event-listing chronology but as a visual chronicle of significant periods and epiphanies from a young life.