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CHAPTER FOUR: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Documents Created by Participants
1he research lessons included activities where participants created or altered
documents, signs, texts and worked in many ways with objects. In some cases
teachers provided art work created by participants following the sessions,
using the drama work as inspiration. Participants were also offered
possibilities to reflect on lessons in a diary format, or on sheets of sugar paper
left in the classroom. All these materials were used as data, and analysed to
see how they reflect the points of interests for the participants.
As objects are central in the theory of Edward Bond their possible use in
reflecting on the lessons was also explored. The objects used in the lessons
became triggers of discussion in focus group interviews. The use of objects
as visual aids in data collection, and also the use of screenshots from video
documentation as data has been very useful; they reinforce Gourlay’s claim
that “expanding the qualitative repertoire towards a more visual orientation
are considerable”.>*!
DATA ANALYSIS
Several experts"? agree on the importance of ongoing sorting and
preliminary analysis of the data. This is specifically important in an action
research framework where the next cycle of research needs to come out of
the analysis of the previous cycle. The data analysis of this research also relied
on an ongoing sorting and preliminary analysis of the data, this was useful in
the first cycle to make decision about which territories to explore, while it was
necessary in the second cycle, because of its developmental nature.
As the participants of the drama lessons were Hungarian all data was
also collected in the Hungarian language and translated into English by
the researcher. In order to keep the data free of any mistranslation all material
was translated prior to the coding process in both cycles. This ensured that
the codes created later did not influence the translation.
The process of analysis was the same with all interviews. After noting
significant information in the interviews categories were created for codes
across the spectrum, and then the relationship between different categories
were examined. The data provided by the questionnaires referred in most
cases to specific issues addressed in the research, for example how much
the participants felt they were ‘making’ the narrative. Responses were
581 Gourlay: Multimodality, 82.
582 Silverman: Doing Oualitative Research; Cohen-Manion-Morrison: Research Methods in
Education; Graham Hithcock — David Hughes: Research and the Teacher: A Qualitative
Introduction to School-based Research, 2% edn., Oxon, Routledge, 1995.
+ 166 +