Categories, Communities and Complexities

Grbich (2007) makes many communities of practice clearer for me with her categorical chapters of document analysis. I thank her for each and every “ah-ha moment” in my reading for this week. In particular, she helped me to understand the underlying ontology/epistemology of certain traditions (discourse analysis, for example) that construct reality in ways that are different from my own conceptions of “truth.” This is most helpful now that I have dabbled in different methodological approaches to data and document analysis.

I remember reading Reynolds’ (2008) The Single Woman and puzzling over phrases indicating that the language (discourse) used by participants allowed them to sort-of create themselves through the language. Reynolds is directly reflexive in stating that she views “identity as something that we can only know about through looking at social practices, since the inner subjectivity remains hidden from the researcher’s view” (p. 25). In examining the discourse and models of the single identity, Reynolds puzzled, “What different ways do they [models of the single identity] offer a woman on her own of understanding her life and her current situation?” (p. 26). My note in the margin next to this passage asks, “Does anyone need to be offered models to understand themselves?”

Citing Foucault, Grbich describes the social constructionist philosophy underlying discourse analysis: “Discourses are not about objects; they do not identify objects, they constitute them and in the practice of doing so conceal their own invention” (as cited in Grbich, 2007, p. 147, emphasis added). Perhaps my struggle with the social construction of reality lies more in the foundational beliefs underlying this philosophy than in my research-self that attempts to understand that I can only work with what my participants share and my interpretations of what they include and omit from their discourse. Noblit (1999) makes the point that “research techniques and methods in qualitative research are incidental to the central act of interpretation. We employ them so that we can make sense of some social scene, but they have no significance independent of the interpretation and the context in which they are used” (p. 14). This leads to some of the general approaches to organizing and making sense of the data before we begin more formal analysis.

Particularly helpful for me was Grbich’s opening chapter on content analysis, which allows the use of this analytic approach as a starting point to begin organizing and familiarizing oneself with a large corpus of data. I personally find it necessary to gather a sense of the whole before determining the exact next course of analytic action, even when approaching data with literature and methodological commitments in tow. While Grbich summarizes one use of content analysis as that, “It can simplify very large documents into enumerative information,” I might be able to tweak that strength in that it can organize a large amount of data into categorical information (p. 122). This adjustment of Grbich’s defining strength in content analysis moves away from the quantitative benefits and into a more thematic approach which I find more amenable to my work.

Grbich’s narrative analysis chapter likewise brought some comfort through continuity for me. Laying out the process of socio-linguistic approaches to narrative, Grbich cites Labov and the elements of a socio-linguistic approach to structured narrative (p. 127). This is consistent with the presentation of Labov’s “evaluation model” as cited in Coffey and Atkinson (1996):

Structure - Question

Abstract - What was this about?
Orientation - Who? What? When? Where?
Complication - Then what happened?
Evaluation - So what?
Result - What finally happened?
Coda - [Finish narrative] (p. 58)

I personally appreciate those golden moments when multiple authors refer back to the seminal work on a topic as Grbich does in her text through connections with Labov in narrative analysis, Jefferson in conversation analysis and Foucault in discourse analysis. These names and this continuity of presentation really help the novice researcher to hone in on those seminal theorists and works.

What I am still troubling with is the chapter about structural and poststructural analysis. Like everything else in my graduate school experiences, I shall attribute my misunderstandings of Grbich’s chapter to a lack of foundational reading on my part in this domain. While I have spent many hours in the process of deconstructing a text or a transcript, Grbich’s chapter did not eliminate, for me, the danger of “its tendency toward nihilism” (p. 180). I find when I am lost in the deconstructed bits, I must return from that place of disconnected pondering lest I allow the very practice of deconstruction to “very quickly lead to meaninglessness” (p. 180).


References other than Grbich

Coffee, A. & Atkinson, P. (1996). Making sense of qualitative data: Complementary research strategies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Noblit, G.W. (1999). Particularities: Collected essays on ethnography and education. New York, NY: Peter Lang

Reynolds, J. (2008). The single woman: A discursive investigation. New York, NY: Routledge.