Selection of Themes and Subcategories

The researcher arrived at various themes and subcategories through a process of constant comparison and saturation of the interview data (Figure 2).

Themes and patterns were identified, organised and categorised in the interviews by interpreting how people worked under electronic monitoring. These themes and subcategories emerged from the data collected. The theoretical framework explains how the findings of this study relate to the existing literature, how the literature is mobilised to explain the findings and how the theory itself is modified and expanded by this study. Before starting the coding process, an interview guide was prepared (Auerbach and Silverstein, 2003), comprising a number of questions derived from the literature on self- discipline and emotion management. Respondents were carefully interviewed using questions that covered the most important areas of the topic. These were categorised into six themes: control, power and discipline; rationality and corrective action; compliance, conformity and resistance; emotional labour and management of emotions; society, responsibility and accountability; and subjectivity, internalisation and the self. Additional topics emerged from questions raised during the interviews. These additional questions examined issues which had not previously been discussed in the literature, particularly in relation to self-discipline and emotion management.

The data collected from the interviews were then categorised and segmented (Auerbach and Silverstein, 2003), ensuring that each interviewee was numbered in order to distinguish each one independently and anonymously. The names of participants were removed from any quotes, and each interview was segmented and categorised under different names.

The information was then coded (Auerbach and Silverstein, 2003). Initially, the most important quotes expressed by interviewees were highlighted. Specific “descriptive codes" were then extracted from each quote, signifying the most important aspects of

the interviewees’ answers. Subsequently, open and In Vivo coding was carried out (Appendix 1, Illustrations 6 and 7) (Charmaz, 2006). In the first cycle, the researcher coded with open codes. In open coding, each quote was carefully read, and words or short phrases were picked out that symbolically assigned a summative, salient, essence- capturing meaning to the data (Holton, 2007). This enabled greater data saturation. In the second cycle, In Vivo coding was used. Again, each quote was carefully read, and either exactly the same units as in open coding or longer passages of text were highlighted. Particular emphasis was placed on extracting information which related to the social context of individuals (Strauss, 1987). These codes later formed the basis for the themes and subcategories of the conceptual framework. Three examples of how the coding was carried out are shown below (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Three examples of coding

“Analytical memos” were used to explain why the quotes for each interviewee were important, and their role in the research (Saldaña, 2009). This was carried out by recording next to each important quote why it was important (Appendix 1, Illustrations 1

and 2). The quotation provided the context for the code, so an extension of the idea was recorded in each memo. At a later stage, other types of memos were built to link ideas (Strauss, 1987), and the relationship of each quote to the research objective of the thesis and what it actually revealed were explained. Analytical memos were written for each interview. According to Saldaña (2009:32), the purpose of analytical memo writing is to document and reflect on the coding process and code choices, the process of inquiry, and emergent patterns, categories and subcategories, themes and concepts in the data, possibly leading to a theory. The researcher read between the lines the subjective thoughts and feelings of respondents concerning the crossover between self-discipline and emotion management. Clarke (2005:202) claims that memos are sites for conversation with ourselves about our data. A code was considered not just as a significant word or phrase applied to a datum, but as a prompt or trigger for written reflection on the deeper and complex meanings it evoked (Saldaña, 2009:33). Weston et al. (2001:397) suggest that coding and analytical memo writing are concomitant qualitative data analysis activities because there is “a reciprocal relationship between the development of a coding system and the evolution of understanding a phenomenon”. In addition, a “methodological memo” was opened, in which the different stages of analysis were recorded (Saldaña, 2013). This methodological memo process was used throughout the coding and analysis to help explain how results were found, as well as to provide evidence of the reliability of the data (Appendix 1, Illustration 3). Memoing is an important stage in the coding process. Glaser (2004) claims that theory articulation is facilitated through an extensive and systematic process of memoing that parallels the data analysis process. Memo writing is a continual process that leads naturally to

abstraction or ideation – continually capturing the “frontier of the analyst’s thinking” as he/she goes through data and codes, sorts and writes (Glaser, 2004). The analyst must interrupt coding to memo ideas as they occur. Memos help the analyst to raise the data to a conceptual level and develop the properties of each category that begin to define them operationally (Glaser, 2004).

A categorisation and conceptualisation process followed, grouping codes and memos into families (Auerbach and Silverstein, 2003). The original 1,100 codes were merged into 400-500 codes well-grounded in the data, with strong density relations with other codes (Appendix 1, Illustration 5). The codes and memos were revised and merged into groups according to their similarities. Each group represented similar ideas expressed by interviewees. Decisions to merge codes and memos were based on a process of generalisation and discrimination. Approximately two dozen memo families were compared with strong codes using two columns. After comparing memos and codes, a theoretical memo was written to record the researcher’s conclusions. This theoretical memo formed the basis on which the conceptual model was constructed (Strauss, 1987). Appendix 2 illustrates how the codes were categorised, merged and matched with memos. In this way, a conceptual framework was derived from the findings of the interviews.

The main themes were then categorised using code and memo families (Appendix 1, Illustrations 8 and 9). After saturating the data, a number of themes emerged from the interview data, which formed a basis for the theoretical framework (Holton, 2007). At this stage, the codes were grouped into themes, matching memos with codes in order to obtain a set of categories and subcategories well grounded in the data. Networks were

then created for the most important categories. As the data were reduced from codes to families, and from families to categories, the number of important ideas was also reduced. The goal was to have only three or four main ideas to structure concepts and theory. However, before establishing which were the most important, several networks constituted the second level of ideas (Appendix 1, Illustration 10).

Once this process had been completed, the researcher had a good understanding of all themes, categories and subcategories, enabling the creation of a theory to explain the relationship between the upper themes, and the drawing of an image or map showing the core variables and the concepts giving sense to them (Saldaña, 2009).

An interpretation system was used to evaluate the findings. The frequency of each phenomenon was checked to establish how often it occurred in the interviews, for example how many times “control” or “discipline” were mentioned by participants (Charmaz, 2006). The researcher also checked for the concurrence of specific behaviours. If a behaviour took place with other behaviours, it was considered more important than if that behaviour happened alone (Charmaz, 2006). Attention was paid to the relationship of each property of the categories with other properties of other categories. For example, “rules of behaviour” was related to an upper level category named “follow rules”. Each category was cross-checked to find out the number of quotes it had and the number of important relationships with other codes. Using analytical memos, the researcher was able to keep track of important information and relationships in the analysis, and to take account of the frequency and concurrence of the evidence. The memo system registered the importance of specific behaviours relating to self-discipline and emotion management (Glaser, 1978).