2.3 The qualitative dissertation: still hazy after all these years  (Page 11/14)

I recall the student who had completed a fairly comprehensive study of school leader perceptions of safety issues and was rushing to defend. He truly had not lived with the data as long as needed to complete a thorough analysis. As a committee member, I requested that as least one data display be produced to capture and highlight the major themes in the findings, and that reduced the data to a stage where the findings could be readily shared in professional setting. The student agreed to complete that display as one of the final revisions. However, because I did not specify the length, that student prepared a complex display over eight pages long that was simply a reiteration of the narrative divided into the boxes of a table. What I intended to be a one page, a one-afternoon only summary had become a 2-week endeavor that never accomplished the purpose. Neither of us was satisfied with the outcome.

These examples show the dilemmas of committee coordination around the qualitative dissertation. The language that we individually use to describe certain processes can be easily misunderstood by the students and other committee members as well. Building a shared linguistic community (Young, 1990) is important both during the committee function and beyond in association among faculty outside the dissertation committee structure. This process can be impeded when committee members have to be replaced; the longer the dissertation takes, the more likely replacements will occur. In addition, hazy notions of rigor and processes can spill over from quantitative practices to cloud and confound our decisions around qualitative research. I have heard many times that the single case N is too small or why bother to do the study if it cannot be generalized. Even when these sentiments are not so directly expressed, they can creep into the discussions, and only through the continued diligence of the chair and committee members can this be prevented.

The Illusive“Black Hole”of Qualitative Data Analysis

One of the most confounding elements of a qualitative dissertation is what I call the“black hole”of data analysis. The many methods chapters that I have read over the years typically address the design of the study, the conceptual framework data collection methods, and sampling techniques. They address less well the“nitty gritty”of what actually happens during data analysis and data reduction. The methods section usually ends with some language about“codes and themes will be emergent in a constant comparative analysis,”or conversely,“the elements of the conceptual framework will be used to code the data through modified induction.”The chapter ends, and the findings chapter begins, leaving the reader, and sometimes committee members, wondering exactly what happened to the data. There is little included, in such instances, about how the data were literally handled by the researchers. I encourage students when writing the methods section of the dissertation to remain“transparent”and even to become literal in their description of the analysis. Students describe in some cases the physical processes of what they did to categorize each unit of data, how all the data were accounted for, and whether there were non-examples or data that did not fit into the codes or themes. Qualitative researchers often talk about the data“telling a story.”Telling the story of data analysis is equally important. I advise students to display their codes and themes succinctly in a table or as an appendix, whichever more clearly explicates the analysis processes for the reader (Fauske, 2000).