I’m presenting at SITE 2005 in a couple of weeks, so I’ve decided to take more of a project management approach to analyzing interview data, and consequently feel somewhat more in control.
To code, I developed a short list of five tentative tree nodes to match a text segment in NVivo, and try to organize child nodes under these. This is to avoid developing elaborate lists of codes that Creswell (1998) says new researchers tend to develop, and sure enough, I would have made a lot of free nodes without the caveat!
What I found reassuring in the interviews that I coded today is the clear connection these participants made between the educational intervention and teacher presence in the online discussion database. After the intervention, they felt more encouraged by the teacher to engage critically with concepts from the readings. This suggests that the intervention might have worked.
My plan is to keep coding through all the interviews for iteration 1, refining the code trees as I go, then review the coded interviews to make sure I am capturing the main themes adequately. Following which, I’ll move on to iteration 2. I’m reading related research articles as I code, so I’ll try to write more about those soon.
Leave a Reply