Looking For Answers

Hey everybody! So this concludes my last week of conducting my independent research! This past week has been nothing short of interesting as it has been filled with work, research, and the most intense job interview of my life (I wish I could tell you more but its classified!). While I enjoyed talking with teachers and observing their classes to get a better understanding of the school community, I am excited to focus on analyzing my data. With that being said, I have a lot of work to do during this next week.

During the data collection process, I collected 14 surveys, observed 26 classes for five teachers, and interviewed 8 teachers and one administrator. Now that I am done collecting all of this information, I need to meticulously go through it all to identify the themes common throughout all of the data. Going into the data collection process two weeks ago, I knew what type of information I was looking for, but I had no idea how I was actually going to go through the information and do the analysis. This was one of the most serious problems I had with my research for quite a while. My biggest problem was that I was going to be doing a qualitative analysis, so there were no rigid procedures that I could follow like with a quantitative analysis. Because of this, I spent a lot of time over these past couple weeks reading ethnographies and literature on how to perform qualitative research to ensure that I used proper analysis techniques.

From this reading, and the developments I made in my research along the way, I was able to develop my methods for how I am going to do my analysis. The first step is to transcribe all of the audio files that I have from the interviews. This is probably going to take the most time for my analysis because I have over 3 hours of audio that I need to transcribe by hand. While this will take a long time, I believe that transcribing these interviews (in addition to already transcribing my notes I took during the interviews) will help me to identify the most important themes present in these conversations. Once I have all of these interviews transcribed, and have noted the most important themes present in these interviews, then I am going to compare all of the teacher responses for each individual question to see if there is a consensus for the responses given to these questions. This should result in the identification of the main themes present throughout these interviews.

In addition to the interviews though, I will be using similar methods for the surveys. Although the majority of my data analysis will come from the interviews, the surveys will be a useful validity check. Since the survey respondents are anonymous and I had no control over which teachers took the survey, they provide a random sample of teachers. Because of this, I can compare what these teachers said to the teachers I chose to interview to see if there is a variation in the responses provided.

Finally, I am going to use my observations as a second validity check. Because some of the questions asked involved student-teacher interactions and the classroom environment, then these observations will be useful in seeing if what the teachers said correlates with what actually happens in the classroom. By the end of all of this, I hope to understand what the most common responses among these methods are, so that when I do my discussion, I can use these themes to understand what characteristics actually make this school successful and why.

So that’s all for this week! I apologize if this post was a little longer  than usual, but I found it useful in collecting my thoughts. Until next week!

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