46 results
11 - Analyzing for implicit cultural meanings
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 142-165
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In this chapter we describe an analytical framework and two types of analytical procedures for studying how people's talk and meaning-making relate to sets of meanings that are shared either locally or more broadly. The analytical procedures that we describe require that researchers pay close attention to language and language use, as well as to features of the local context and the larger culture. The researcher also needs to pay close attention to the relation of these larger cultural features to individual meaning-making.
We describe two kinds of analytical procedures. One kind focuses mainly on how people take shared sets of meanings into use in their talk and meaning-making. The second kind focuses mainly on how shared sets of meanings encourage certain ways of understanding oneself and others and discourage other ways. The procedures we describe treat interviews and other kinds of conversations as necessarily part of a larger social world beyond the immediate context in which the words are said. Thinking about conversations in this way moves the researcher's attention to what we call implicit cultural meanings – that is, meanings about some area of life that members of an interpretive community share and take for granted.
We begin with an overview of the analytical framework for the procedures for analysis we describe in this chapter. After that, we describe analytical procedures that enable a researcher to discern the implicit cultural meanings that a group of people share and to discern how they take those meanings into use. In the final section of the chapter, we describe analytical procedures that enable researchers to study individual meaning-making; these procedures concern how implicit cultural meanings may inform or restrict how people understand themselves and others.
Analytical framework: implicit cultural meanings
The general theoretical framework of this book holds that personal meanings and meaning-making are not idiosyncratic. Personal meanings are always fashioned within the network of possible meanings that are available in the interpretive communities of which the person is a member. People always understand events, other people, and themselves against a background of shared meanings. We use the expression implicit cultural meanings to denote meanings about some issue or area of life that are shared and taken for granted by the members of a particular social group or that are commonplace in the culture at large.
7 - Preparing for analysis
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 73-82
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Up to this point in the research process, the researcher's main tasks have been to plan the project, construct researchable questions, keep notes in the research journal, and do interviews. We now move toward the next phase: doing the analyses. Before you enter the analysis phase, there are several steps you need to take. You need to transcribe your interview material. You also need to consider what to do in order to ensure that your project will meet high standards of quality. You also need to orient yourself to the possible frameworks and procedures for analysis of interview material. We discuss these things in this chapter, turning first to transcription.
Transcribing your interviews
The analyses in interpretative research involve close work with people's words. To do this work, neither listening to an interview recording nor working from notes is sufficient. You must work with a written transcription that is a verbatim (i.e., word-for-word) record of what was said. Transcribing interviews is arduous and time-consuming. You listen to a small segment of talk (often just a phrase or two or a part of a sentence), then stop the playback device, and type what you have heard. You should keep the segments that you play short, otherwise you will either miss words or inadvertently add your own words to what you have heard. Because people often do not speak clearly, you are likely to have to listen to some segments more than once in order to be sure that you have heard and recorded correctly. Transcribing semi-structured interviews is a slow process. It may take between three and five hours to transcribe an hour of talk; depending on the level of detail that you want to capture in the transcription, it may take even longer. You need to plan your time accordingly.
When to transcribe
If at all possible, you should transcribe each interview right after you complete it. At that point, you will still remember what happened in the interview and may be able to complement the spoken words with notes about body language, tone of voice, and so on, as well as with your own reflections during the interview. Furthermore, if you transcribe an interview soon after you have conducted it, you may find it easier to recontact a participant if you find that some critical element is missing or is unclear.
5 - Designing the interview guide
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 46-57
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
This chapter shows you how to prepare a comprehensive interview guide. You need to prepare such a guide before you start interviewing. The interview guide serves many purposes. Most important, it is a memory aid to ensure that the interviewer covers every topic and obtains the necessary detail about the topic. For this reason, the interview guide should contain all the interview items in the order that you have decided. The exact wording of the items should be given, although the interviewer may sometimes depart from this wording. Interviews often contain some questions that are sensitive or potentially offensive. For such questions, it is vital to work out the best wording of the question ahead of time and to have it available in the interview.
To study people's meaning-making, researchers must create a situation that enables people to tell about their experiences and that also foregrounds each person's particular way of making sense of those experiences. Put another way, the interview situation must encourage participants to tell about their experiences in their own words and in their own way without being constrained by categories or classifications imposed by the interviewer. The type of interview that you will learn about here has a conversational and relaxed tone. However, the interview is far from extemporaneous. The interviewer works from the interview guide that has been carefully prepared ahead of time. It contains a detailed and specific list of items that concern topics that will shed light on the researchable questions.
Often researchers are in a hurry to get into the field and gather their material. It may seem obvious to them what questions to ask participants. Seasoned interviewers may feel ready to approach interviewing with nothing but a laundry list of topics. But it is always wise to move slowly at this point. Time spent designing and refining interview items – polishing the wording of the items, weighing language choices, considering the best sequence of topics, and then pretesting and revising the interview guide – will always pay off in producing better interviews. Moreover, it will also provide you with a deep knowledge of the elements of the interview and a clear idea of the intent behind each of the items. This can help you to keep the interviews on track.
Index
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 187-189
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Epilogue
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 178-181
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In this epilogue, we offer our reflections on several features of interpretative research. We begin by considering how interpretative research is situated in relation to other scientific research. All scientific research is guided by theory, which gives the researcher a set of concepts and previous findings for thinking about the topics that are being studied. All good social research uses systematic methods of selecting participants for study, systematic methods for gathering material from them, and systematic and transparent procedures for analyzing that material. Also, there are common ethical standards for conducting a study and common standards for reporting the results of research.
Beyond the commonalities, each approach to research has distinctive features that are determined by its overarching framework. Let us briefly recap the overarching framework of interpretative research. To begin with, interpretative researchers think of people as always located in social contexts and as continually engaged in making sense of their experiences. Interpretative researchers seek to understand the meanings that people give to particular events and actions. They also want to know how those meanings arise in the cultural and social settings in which people live – how people arrive at meanings through their interactions with others and how they then make those meanings their own.
To accomplish their goals, interpretative researchers employ several distinctive procedures. These procedures set their research apart from, for instance, experimental research and survey research. We have found that some beginners are puzzled by certain procedures of interpretative research. We discuss four such procedures here: the use of semi-structured interviews, the use of purposive selection for composing study groups, the use of open researchable questions instead of a priori hypotheses, and the practice of refining and augmenting the researchable questions as the research unfolds.
Using semi-structured interviews
To learn about people's meaning-making, interpretative researchers rely on interviews in which they ask participants to tell about real-life relationships and situations. They ask participants to tell about their thoughts, intentions, reactions, and reflections, and how and for what reasons they made choices about how to act. When people agree to take part in such research interviews, they shoulder the task of explaining themselves to the interviewer – of making themselves understandable to an outsider who lacks local knowledge. Such interviews are therefore likely to be dense with clues about the participants' ways of seeing the world.
9 - Analyzing stories in interviews
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 102-122
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Stories are a means by which people impose order on their experiences. They are, therefore, a key element of how people make sense of themselves and their worlds. The narrative theorist David Herman (2009) offered a succinct definition of “story”: “stories are accounts of what happened to particular people and of what it was like for them to experience what happened – in particular circumstances and with specific consequences. Narrative, in other words, is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change” (p.2).
By looking closely at the way that people make stories out of their experiences, researchers can glimpse the worldviews and understandings that are the building blocks of their stories. Although people's stories about their experiences are personal, their meanings are put in place through joint action, that is, in transactions with others. Meanings are both local (i.e., negotiated within local interpretive communities such as family and friends) and cultural (i.e., shared by broader interpretive communities). As people tell their stories, they may make many kinds of meanings. For example, they may attribute motives to themselves and others, they may ascribe or imply causality, and they may convey, directly or indirectly, their evaluative perspective regarding the events in the story.
The analyses we describe in this chapter have goals similar to the goals of the analyses you learned about in Chapter 8. As in Chapter 8, the analyses aim to identify regularities or shared features in a set of interviews. Such analyses can help you answer researchable questions about your participants' meaning-making in relation to the interpretive communities of which they are part. Although different persons do not tell the “same” story, people who are members of the same interpretive community build their personal stories from similar building blocks of meaning.
How can analyzing stories told by your research participants help you address your researchable questions? It is unlikely that your initial researchable questions would be “What stories about the phenomenon did the participants tell in the interviews?” However, it is likely that a close look at the stories that participants tell in interviews will tell you things that would be difficult to find out in other ways. For example, stories open a window onto people's evaluative perspectives. What you learn by analyzing stories can add to the body of knowledge that you are accumulating about the researchable questions.
Frontmatter
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp i-iv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
4 - Making decisions about participants
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 34-45
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
This chapter takes up a number of questions concerning the participants in a research project. In the first part of the chapter, we address how to specify the group of participants that is best suited to your study. We emphasize that you need to keep your researchable questions in mind as you make decisions regarding those whom you will study. We also discuss the theoretical and practical issues that you have to take into account when you specify the group that you will study. In the next part, we discuss considerations about the appropriate number of participants to study. We then turn to the steps you take to locate potential participants, enlist their participation, and set up the time and the place for the interviews. We also present the ethical and practical concerns that you need to address in this process.
Specifying the group(s) of people to study
How do you decide who the best participants are for your study? And how do you decide how many individuals to interview? The answers to these questions are based on the choices that you made and the theoretical considerations you had when you developed your researchable questions. We described strategies for developing your researchable questions in Chapter 3. Here we offer guidelines for specifying the types of individuals whose participation will enable you to answer those questions.
When you set out to specify the group you will study, you must take into account the kind of knowledge you seek. Different types of research involve different types of knowledge, and therefore demand different principles for specifying the group to study. Each project's researchable questions form the basis for specifying its participants. We therefore take a moment to remind you of what we have said earlier about researchable questions in interpretative research.
The knowledge interests of interpretative researchers involve learning about the participants' worldviews as the participants themselves formulate them. The researchable questions are framed in terms of specific contexts, specific aspects of daily life, and specific experiences. Furthermore, and in special focus here, the researchable questions identify categories of people who are likely to have had those experiences.
Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- A Learner's Guide
- Eva Magnusson, Jeanne Marecek
-
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015
-
For many students, the experience of learning about and using qualitative methods can be bewildering. This book is an accessible step-by-step guide to conducting interview-based qualitative research projects. The authors discuss the 'hows' and 'whys' of qualitative research, showing readers the practices as well as the principles behind them. The book first describes how to formulate research questions suited to qualitative inquiry. It then discusses in detail how to select and invite research participants into a study and how to design and carry out good interviews. It next presents several ways to analyze interviews and provides readers with many worked examples of analyses. It also discusses how to synthesize findings and how to present them. Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research equips readers in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, education, counseling, nursing, and public health with the knowledge and skills necessary to embark on their own projects.
6 - Doing the interview
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 58-72
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Research interviews are not ordinary conversations. The interviewer is there to learn something from the participant; therefore, the focus is on the participant, and the participant does most of the talking. The questions in the interview guide govern the content of the interview. The interviewer asks those questions and also manages the interaction throughout the conversation. The interviewer is responsible for ensuring that the conversation flows smoothly and that the participant feels comfortable.
In this chapter, you will learn the principles and practices for conducting face-to-face interviews. The chapter focuses on the interviewing craft: what experienced interviewers do in typical interview situations and what they can do when problems arise. We begin the chapter with an overview of the sequence of an interview. Then we describe techniques for guiding an interview and maintaining its structure. This is followed by a section about complicated situations that sometimes occur during interviews and how the interviewer can resolve them. We then discuss what it is like to be an interviewer in a research interview. We also discuss the relationship between interviewer and participant. Finally, we give advice on how to conduct pretests and pilot tests of your interview guide.
An overview of the research interview
This section is an overview of the interviewer's main activities during the successive phases of a research interview. The purpose is to give an overall sense of the flow of an interview; we will describe complications later.
The preliminaries
Most of the preliminary decisions will be made before you enter the interview situation. You will have made the decisions regarding the participants, which we described in Chapter 4 – for example, whom to interview, how to reach and recruit participants, and where to hold the interviews. You will also have composed the interview guide, as we described in Chapter 5.
2 - Some examples of interpretative research
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 10-26
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
One of the best ways to learn about interpretative research is to get acquainted with some actual projects. In this chapter, we describe five projects. Our intention is to show what the researchers were interested in, how they specified what they wanted to study in order to make it researchable, how they gathered their material, some examples of analyses, and some findings that the projects yielded. The projects we describe concern diverse topics, locales, and peoples: childrearing practices in the USA and Taiwan; repeated re-hospitalizations of people in the USA who had severe mental illnesses; how heterosexual couples in the Nordic countries make sense of gender-equal practices in daily life; Canadian women's accounts of their depressive experiences; and the spiral of suicide-like behavior among adolescent girls in Sri Lanka.
We have two reasons for presenting these projects. First, we want to give a sense of what interpretative research is like; for instance, how such projects might be structured and the kinds of questions that researchers can answer. Second, we use some of these projects as examples when we describe different ways of analyzing interviews. Before you read further, let us point out that these five studies do not cover all types of interpretative research. The selected studies illustrate some possibilities of such research, not all such possibilities.
As you will see, two of the project descriptions in this chapter stem from studies in which one of us was the researcher. We do not include these studies because they are necessarily the best examples of interpretative research, but rather because we have full knowledge of all the details, including details that normally are not described in research articles. (Quite a lot of what goes on in research is omitted in research publications.) Furthermore, we have extensive material from these studies, including, for example, interview transcripts, our research journals, and unpublished reports.
3 - Planning and beginning an interpretative research project
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 27-33
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In Chapter 2, we described some studies that used interpretative approaches. These descriptions gave you a taste of how the researchers went about their projects. They also pointed to some concrete steps involved in planning and doing interpretative research. In this chapter, we describe in closer detail what you need to think about and do during the initial stages of a project. In Chapter 2, we also introduced the terms “knowledge interest” and “researchable question.” To recap, a knowledge interest is the general topic that a researcher sets out to learn about. As you learned, a knowledge interest is usually stated in general or abstract terms. It is usually not researchable in itself; researchers therefore need to devise one or more researchable questions. Developing researchable questions is a crucial first step in planning an interpretative research project. It demands a great deal of thought and effort.
Knowledge interests often have their origins in a researcher's everyday experiences, including his or her personal concerns and commitments. They may also originate from the concerns or experiences of a social group about which the researcher is knowledgeable, or from reading the research literature. The projects you read about in Chapter 2 originated in the researchers' general and overarching knowledge interests, which were based in different spheres of daily life and different spheres of society. Those descriptions, of course, show only a few of the possible knowledge interests that interpretative researchers might have and only a few of all possible settings where such interests can arise. When you read the research literature, you will see many more.
As you begin to map out a project, it is a good idea to clarify what your knowledge interests are, and the sphere of your life or of society from which they emerge. Make notes about your reflections and recollections. As we discuss in the next section, you should record such reflections in a research journal dedicated to the project. You will be able to use those reflections when you move from your knowledge interests to the detailed plan for your study.
10 - Analyzing talk-as-action
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 123-141
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
As you already know, interviews are a form of conversation. That is, research interviews are not only occasions for gathering material pertinent to your researchable questions but also occasions in which two or more persons are interacting. The people interacting in the interview are always doing more with their talk than asking questions and giving answers. For instance, through their talk, people are also continually creating a relationship with their conversation partners; through what they say, they are often also creating relationships with people who are not present. Researchers have used several different terms to refer to these and other interactive functions of talk. Examples are “the action orientation of talk,” “what people do with their talk,” “talk-in-interaction,” “texts and talk in action,” and “talk-as-action.” These different expressions do not have exactly identical meanings; they have their origins in different theoretical traditions. We have settled on one of these terms: talk-as-action (Edwards, 1997). Talk-as-action and its analytical possibilities are the focus of this chapter. We describe how studying talk-as-action can help you address your researchable questions and in some cases develop those questions further.
The analytical framework and procedures that we describe in this chapter bring into focus the interaction work that people's talk does beyond communicating facts, meanings, or opinions to listeners. For instance, if speakers want to persuade listeners of their opinion, they usually use explicit arguments in favor of that opinion. But they also tend to mold the form of their talk in ways that make it more persuasive. These ways may not appear to have anything directly to do with the topic.
The analyses that we describe concern what talk achieves in conversation and how those achievements are conditioned by the context in which the talk occurs. Some of the analyses examine the immediate interpersonal context of the talk, for example, who the conversation partners are. Other analyses focus on the sociocultural context of the talk, that is, the larger societal setting in which the talk is taking place. The chapter begins with an example that illustrates talk-as-action. We then present the analytical framework for the chapter. Next we present a compendium of conversational features that are useful as entry points for analyses of talk-as-action. We illustrate each conversational feature with examples from our own research.
8 - Finding meanings in people's talk
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 83-101
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In semi-structured interviews, participants talk about various topics, stories, and reflections that are pertinent to the researchable questions that a researcher has. Such interviews yield a substantial amount of loosely structured material, much of which pertains in some way or another to the researchable questions. In this chapter, we take up analyses that address questions such as: What sense do people make in regard to the phenomenon that you are studying? What are the experiences that shape those meanings? These questions flow directly from the general theoretical framework of this book. The analyses we describe are based in a view of people as actively engaged in making meaning of the events in their lives and as located in social contexts that set the frames for personal meaning-making.
The analyses that you will learn in this chapter enable you to examine the patterns of shared meanings and variations that typify the group of people whom you interviewed. You could say that these analyses concern the “what” (or rather the “whats”) of people's talk. In other words, what reflections, points of view, experiences, and emotions do people typically bring forward to give meaning to their experiences? Larry Davidson, for example, whose work you read about in Chapter 2, studied the ways that people with severe mental illnesses understood their experiences of frequent re-hospitalization. Sometimes meanings are explicit and directly stated. In such cases, they are fairly easy to identify. But people also make meaning in less explicit ways. You may therefore have to attend to oblique references, to participants’ use of “loaded” words or phrases, and perhaps to asides or tangential remarks made during the interview. You may also need to consider what goes unspoken – that is, what is simply not part of the local talk about an issue.
This chapter explains analytical procedures for getting at people's meanings. The procedures involve interpretation: that is, they go beyond a mechanical search for specific words or phrases. They require you to exercise your judgment about the meaning of what participants say. They also require you to draw on your expertise regarding the cultural background of your participants.
1 - Introduction
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 1-9
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
People continually reflect on themselves and their worlds, and they are continually called upon to give accounts of themselves. People have hopes, fears, reasons, intentions, and values, and they may experience times of satisfaction, confusion, and demoralization. The premise of this book is that researchers ought to and can study these matters. In this book, we give readers the conceptual framework and practical tools to do so.
We have written this book for students and researchers who are new to qualitative research. We have been doing qualitative research for more than two decades. Each of us has taught courses on qualitative research for many years and supervised such research in a variety of contexts. We have taught psychology students, medical students, students in interdisciplinary programs such as gender studies, and social science researchers new to this type of research. We have also jointly conducted seminars on research methods in several countries and for scholars from many backgrounds. And we have written about theories and practices of gender research (Magnusson and Marecek, 2012). This book draws on all of these experiences as teachers, supervisors, and researchers. Our hope is that readers of this book will become adept and judicious practitioners of the research methods that we present.
Introducing interpretative research
Before we proceed, we pause to introduce a key term. For the types of research methods you will learn here, the term qualitative research is the term most commonly used. However, we use the term interpretative research. We have chosen this term because it is both more precise and more descriptive. Interpretation is at the heart of the research methods we describe in this book. The goal of these methods is to understand – that is, to interpret – the meanings that people ascribe to events and actions, how they make these meanings their own, and how they negotiate these meanings in interactions with other people. The term interpretative research thus forthrightly proclaims the central purpose of the research as well as the central activity of the researcher.
References
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 182-186
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
12 - Reporting your project
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 166-177
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In this chapter, we turn to the matter of composing the final research report. We focus mainly on composing reports about students' projects (such as doctoral dissertations, master's theses, or undergraduate theses) and manuscripts intended for scholarly journals. The focus here is on how to write a report. However, writing is not confined to the end of a project. As you have learned, an interpretative research project involves writing from the very first stage of the research process. Put simply, writing is part of the research process and cannot be separated from it. This is why we have urged you to keep a research journal from the beginning and to write notes and reflections in it at every stage of your project. You will have been doing two kinds of writing: the first kind comprises the notes, reflections, and hunches in your research journal, and the second has involved writing down summaries of and notes about the results that you produced as you carried out your analyses. The latter includes the documentation of your interpretations in the form of descriptive notes, integrative summaries, and the like.
There are a number of benefits to recognizing that writing is a continual process that is integral to carrying out every phase of a project. First, by writing continually, you continually compel yourself to clarify your thinking. Second, writing notes about your process, as well as noting down the intermediate steps by which you arrived at the results of your analyses, provides a thorough record of the judgments and decisions that you made at each step of the project. Third, the notes afford a source of evidence that your work has been done with care and thoroughness. There is a fourth reason behind the writing you have done. This one is pragmatic, and you are now at a stage to capitalize on it: Many parts of the writing you have done can serve as the basic material for parts of your report.
Contents
- Eva Magnusson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
-
- Book:
- Doing Interview-based Qualitative Research
- Published online:
- 05 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp v-vi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Migration and autism spectrum disorder: population-based study
- Cecilia Magnusson, Dheeraj Rai, Anna Goodman, Michael Lundberg, Selma Idring, Anna Svensson, Ilona Koupil, Eva Serlachius, Christina Dalman
-
- Journal:
- The British Journal of Psychiatry / Volume 201 / Issue 2 / August 2012
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 January 2018, pp. 109-115
- Print publication:
- August 2012
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- HTML
- Export citation
-
Background
Migration has been implicated as a risk factor for autism, but evidence is limited and inconsistent.
AimsTo investigate the relationship between parental migration status and risk of autism spectrum disorder, taking into consideration the importance of region of origin, timing of migration and possible discrepancies in associations between autism subtypes.
MethodRecord-linkage study within the total child population of Stockholm County between 2001 and 2007. Individuals with high- and low-functioning autism were defined as having autism spectrum disorder with and without comorbid intellectual disability, and ascertained via health and habilitation service registers.
ResultsIn total, 4952 individuals with autism spectrum disorder were identified, comprising 2855 children with high-functioning autism and 2097 children with low-functioning autism. Children of migrant parents were at increased risk of low-functioning autism (odds ratio (OR) = 1.5, 95% CI 1.3–1.7); this risk was highest when parents migrated from regions with a low human development index, and peaked when migration occurred around pregnancy (OR = 2.3, 95% CI 1.7–3.0). A decreased risk of high-functioning autism was observed in children of migrant parents, regardless of area of origin or timing of migration. Parental age, income or obstetric complications did not fully explain any of these associations.
ConclusionsEnvironmental factors associated with migration may contribute to the development of autism presenting with comorbid intellectual disability, especially when acting in utero. High- and low-functioning autism may have partly different aetiologies, and should be studied separately.
The Child and Adolescent Twin Study in Sweden (CATSS)
- Henrik Anckarsäter, Sebastian Lundström, Linnea Kollberg, Nora Kerekes, Camilla Palm, Eva Carlström, Niklas Långström, Patrik K. E. Magnusson, Linda Halldner, Sven Bölte, Christopher Gillberg, Clara Gumpert, Maria Råstam, Paul Lichtenstein
-
- Journal:
- Twin Research and Human Genetics / Volume 14 / Issue 6 / December 2011
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 February 2012, pp. 495-508
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- Export citation
-
The Child and Adolescent Twin Study in Sweden (CATSS) is an ongoing longitudinal twin study targeting all twins born in Sweden since July 1, 1992. Since 2004, parents of twins are interviewed regarding the children's somatic and mental health and social environment in connection with their 9th or 12th birthdays (CATSS-9/12). By January 2010, 8,610 parental interviews concerning 17,220 twins had been completed, with an overall response rate of 80%. At age 15 (CATSS-15) and 18 (CATSS-18), twins and parents complete questionnaires that, in addition to assessments of somatic and mental health, include measures of personality development and psychosocial adaptation. Twin pairs in CATSS-9/12 with one or both twins screening positive for autism spectrum disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, tic disorders, developmental coordination disorder, learning disorders, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, obsessive–compulsive disorder, and/or eating problems have been followed with in-depth questionnaires on family, social environment and personality, and subsequently by clinical assessments at age 15 together with randomly selected population controls, including 195 clinically assessed twin pairs from the first 2 year cohorts (CATSS-15/DOGSS). This article describes the cohorts and study groups, data collection, and measures used. Prevalences, distributions, heritability estimates, ages at onset, and sex differences of mental health problems in the CATSS-9/12, that were analyzed and found to be overall comparable to those of other clinical and epidemiological studies. The CATSS study has the potential of answering important questions on the etiology of childhood mental health problems and their role in the development of later adjustment problems.