Research Process

To relate the method to my research question at hand, I examined the documents and the transcripts of the interviews, and analysed their conceptualisation of the relations between youth’s local livelihoods and the surrounding conflict. At the same time I read scientific literature on livelihoods, livelihood development, conflict’s effect on livelihoods, displacement’s effects on livelihoods, and similar themes, and examined the data in the context of this literature. Questions which were asked of the data included: what kind of relation is there between displacement and livelihoods in the data? Does displacement disrupt livelihoods? And why do youth join armed groups: is it for their own security, do they see it primarily as a means of survival or livelihood, or are they forcibly abducted? How do I reconcile scientific literature on the relations between unemployment, political violence and political marginalisation with what the respondents at Finn Church Aid said? These are the types of questions that can aid in finding patterns and forming categories from the data. 6.3.1. The Coding Process

There are different phases to Grounded Theory, and the coding process. Firstly, the coding process is divided into substantive coding and theoretical coding. In substantive coding the researcher works directly with the data, and codes it, beginning with a phase called open coding, till the emergence of the core category. After this the process of selective coding begins, whereby the aim is to “theoretically saturate the core and related concepts.” (266: Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). Thereafter the researcher turns to forming the theoretical framework, and

34 begins to develop theoretical codes to integrate the substantive codes to one another – hence theoretical codes are like the links in the theoretical framework (Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). The theoretical framework should be centred around the core category, and be able to explain the social processes that are being researched within the data.

6.3.2. Substantive Coding

In the first phase – which is called open coding – the researcher coded the data line-by- line and compares incidents within the data, asking questions such as: “What is this data a study of? What category does this incident indicate? What is actually happening in the data?” (275: Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). This process of constant comparison guided the development of emergent theory by ensuring that the data actually supports emergent categories (Bryant and Charmaz, 2007).

Therefore, the researcher went through the project reports and the interviews to identify different incidents which exhibited a potential youth livelihood-conflict connection. ‘Memos’ based upon the data were written, which asked questions like “what is happening in this incident” and “what are the social processes taking place here”? Through the process of constant comparison certain themes predominated, such as displacement, armed groups, youth livelihoods, education and livelihood development.

After comparing incidents to each other and forming emerging concepts, then these concepts were compared to other incidents, as well as to other emerging concepts” (Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). This process also made the researcher come to terms with “similarities, differences and degrees in consistency of meaning between indicators,” which aided the development of categories and their properties, giving rise to a coded category (278: Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). This continued until ‘theoretical saturation’ was achieved (Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). “Categories are saturated when ‘no additional data” is “found whereby the analyst can develop the properties of a category” (185: Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). This phase allowed for the development of themes mentioned above into more generalisable concepts, so that properties of each theme could be determined, and continued until no new properties could be located.

After the point of theoretical saturation, the analysis process proceeded to the development of the ‘core category.’ The core category is meant to tie the different categories and concepts together, and so this core “becomes the focus of further selective data collection and coding efforts” (280: Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). The core category is supposed to occur

35 frequently within the data, and it has to “relate to as many other categories and properties as possible” (280: Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). Although ‘displacement’ seemed to be an extremely pervasive and theme in the data, it was thought that having displacement as a core category would lead to a too broad of a research topic. Furthermore, the research question had been about the relation of youth livelihoods to the local conflict, so it made sense to focus on this, and to use ‘youth livelihoods’ as the core category. Other categories which were very relevant were livelihood development, conflict sensitivity, education, armed groups, psychosocial education and also gender.

6.3.3. Data Analysis: Theoretical Coding

After the discovery of the core category, the research needs to focus on the relations between the core category and other categories, a process which is called theoretical coding (Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). This began with selective coding of the core category. Data collection and coding was now centred round the “emerging conceptual framework,” which in effect are “the core [category] and those categories which are relevant to the core” (280: Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). All categories and concepts related to youth livelihoods were the focus of coding to determine the emerging theoretical framework.

In the end, the most central categories which were found to related to youth livelihoods, and which were the focus of coding efforts, were: (1) Livelihood Development; (2) Armed Groups and Recruitment; (3) Displacement; (4) Conflict Sensitivity and Do No Harm; (5) Education and Psychosocial support and (6) Gender. All of the categories were related closely to youth livelihoods as well as extremely inter-related, and so were deemed to be relevant to the research.

After this the individual concepts can be related to each other through the suitable ‘theoretical codes,’ and this is when the coding and conceptualisation can end, and when we are approaching the final theoretical framework. The so-called theoretical codes are codes, which are used to “conceptualise how the substantive codes may relate to each other” within the theoretical framework (283: Bryant and Charmaz, 2007). This meant that the relations between the categories outlined above were conceptualised, so that a theoretical framework framing the relations of youth livelihoods and conflict based on the data could be constructed.

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