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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 +
