Data Analysis and Theory Building

Project Guidelines

The purpose of this assignment is to get practice at analyzing qualitative data in order to build preliminary arguments about your findings. In this assignment, you will need to decide on how to focus your coding, use this focus to code transcripts in our class dataset, read at least two academic research articles that relate to your focus, and use your coding to develop a sociological argument in writing about either the impact of COVID-19 on people’s economic situations and homes lives OR on how distance learning has affected children and families. This assignment will be graded using a 100 point scale. On March 16, you will be turning in your CODING REPORTS and ANALYTICAL RESEARCH ESSAY, worth 50 points each. These will be submitted directly to Canvas in two separate assignments.

1) STEP ONE: DECIDING ON A FOCUS TO HELP YOU NARROW YOUR POOL OF INTERVIEWS TO ANALYZE

Because our class dataset is so large, you will need to choose a focus for your coding. You could choose a single demographic groupto focus on and only analyze that subset of the data (such as single moms, or Latinx respondents). If you choose a demographic focus, you will code all of the interviews in their entirety in that whole subset. Or you could choose two groups to compare, such as essential workers versus remote workers, or mom versus dads, or parents with young children versus parents with high school age children. Here is the spreadsheet(Links to an external site.) with the demographic descriptions of each respondent. Here is the class dataset (Links to an external site.). Whatever you decide, your subset should have at least 8-12 interviews that you code in full.

2) STEP TWO: CODING THE INTERVIEWS (50 POINTS)

Listen to Jen’s lecture about coding and read the sample coding reports in the discussion forum called The Mysterious Process of Coding . Come to the Zoom meeting where you can practice coding. We will do our coding inside the free online qualitative data analysis software called Taguette, which you can find here: https://app.taguette.org/

Go through the How to Get Started in Taguette tutorial that Jen made. Be sure that you add her (deanza_jen) as a collaborator to your project. You cannot get credit for your coding reports if you have not done this.

You will then begin coding the interviews in Taguette. Be sure to code for this at a very minimum:

  • Themes that recur across multiple interviews
  • Typologies that organize ideas across multiple interviews

Jen will be able to see your coding catalog develop as you code each interview. In Weeks 8-10, you will be coding a few interviews per week and Jen will be looking at your progress.

3) STEP THREE: CONTEXTUALIZING YOUR OWN ANALYSIS IN RELATIONSHIP TO PREVIOUS LITERATURE

After you have coded half of your interviews, you will do a very small literature review, using J-STOR (Links to an external site.) and the Pew Research Center (Links to an external site.), to find one scholarly SOCIOLOGICAL journal article that relates DIRECTLY and SPECIFICALLY to the themes that have begun to emerge in your interviews. We will practice how to search in J-STOR during one of our Zoom meetings. Choose at least one academic journal article and one quantitative Pew Research Center article that most closely related to the themes you think you might focus on for your analysis. Read them and think about how they relate to what you found in your coding and analysis. You must discuss these articles, and how they relate to your findings, in your essay. How do our qualitative interviews provide insight in relation to previous research? How does previous research relate to or inform or help make sense of what themes are emerging in your interviews. You can find some help about how to use J-STOR in the link to our MURAL (Links to an external site.) from our Zoom session on February 25th.

4) STEP FOUR: USING YOUR CODES TO DEVELOP AN ANALYTICAL RESEARCH ESSAY (50 POINTS)

Once you have finished coding all of your interviews, decide on 3-5 codes that you will focus on. Export these reports and read all of the passages related to those themes. What SOCIOLOGICAL points can you develop based on these code reports? Based on these 3-5 code reports, you will write a 4-5 page essay (typed, doublespaced, 1-inch margins) that develops a tentative argument or theory or model or typology based on the interviews you analyzed.

INTRODUCTION

Your essay must have a 2-3 paragraph introduction that includes:

  • a hook
  • a sociological thesis statement (a thesis is an ARGUMENT you are making, that tries to prove a point using your data; it is not the same thing as a topic sentence. A thesis makes a point *about* a topic.)
  • a literature review based on the two research articles most related to your topic (in at least 1 or 2 well developed paragraphs). This literature review should summarize the main points and findings of each research article and explain how they relate to your own thesis.

BODY

Your thesis will be supported in the body of the essay by 4-6 well developed P.I.E. paragraphs. These body paragraphs will be based on the 3-5 codes you chose to focus on. You will develop paragraphs using the P.I.E. paragraph format:

  • Your paragraphs should take the form of PIE paragraphs: Point/Illustration/Explanation.
  • Your Points should be related to your codes.
  • Provide plenty of textual Illustrations using quotes from any of the interviews that best illustrate and support your Points. Your explanations should also make clear how common or representative this theme or typology was across the dataset.
  • Explain/Analyze: your point, the quotations you use, how those quotations relate to/fit in with/represent the rest of the dataset, how common or representative this theme or typology was across the dataset, and how the quotations illustrate your points.

CONCLUSION

The essay will have a concluding paragraph that addresses the “So What?” question regarding your analysis. Why does this research matter? Why should we care?

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