Discovering Themes: What to do with fieldnotes

 What the hell do I do with all these fieldnotes?

Discovering THEMES in your qualitative research:

• WORD-BASED TECHNIQUES (easy)
• TEXTUAL SCRUTINY (harder)
• ANALYZING LINGUISTIC FEATURES (not impossible)
• MANIPULATION OR THE TEXT (can't beat it- necessary)

Word-based techniques are typically a fast and efficient ways to start looking for themes, and are particularly useful at early stages of theme identification. These techniques are also easy for novice researchers to apply. 

1. Word repetitions

If you want to understand what people are talking about, look at the words they use.

• Words that occur a lot are often seen as being salient in the minds of respondents. 
• D'Andrade notes that "perhaps the simplest and most direct indication of schematic organization in naturalistic discourse is the repetition of associative linkages" (1991:294). 
• Anyone who has listened to long stretches of talk, whether generated by a friend, spouse, workmate, informant, or patient, knows how frequently people circle through the same ideas using familiar language.

Cleophatra: Drag is a celebration of everything, life, unity, inclusion…it should never be something that excludes. The only label I need is my name.

Gender queer punk rock aret comedy, dance, camp, queens. Drag queens do not have to conform to a mold. The performance art community is very gender fluid in Philadelophia, in drag, burlesque everywhere. Drag can be cookie cutter or open. In AC, it is open

Word repetitions can be analyzed formally and informally. 

• In the informal mode, you simply read the text and note words or synonyms that people use a lot. 
• repetitions indicate some ideas were important, recurring themes. 
• A more formal analysis of word frequencies can be done by generating a list of all the unique words in a text and counting the number of times each occurs. (sort of like "coding")

2. Indigenous categories

Look for local terms that may sound unfamiliar or are used in unfamiliar ways. 

• Understanding indigenous categories and how they are organized has long been a goal of cognitive and linguistic anthropologists. 
• The basic idea in this area of research is that experience and expertise are often marked by specialized vocabulary. 

to "read" someone
"camp"
"uber-femme"

3. Key-words-in-context (KWIC)

If you want to understand a concept, then look at how it is used. 

• In this technique, once you identify key words, systematically search the texts you have to find all instances of the word or phrase. Each time they find a word, make a copy of it and its immediate context. Themes get identified by physically sorting the examples into piles of similar meaning.

Nothing, however, beats a careful scrutiny of the texts for finding themes that may be more subtle or that don’t get signified directly in the lexicon of the text. Scrutiny-based techniques are more time-intensive and require a lot of attention to details and nuances.

4. Compare and contrast

Themes represent the ways in which texts are either similar or different from each other.

• This kind of detailed work keeps you focused on the data rather than on your preconceptions. Like a good journalist, you compare answers to questions across people, space, and time.
• This approach is like "interviewing the text" 
• "How is this text different from the preceding text?" 
• "What kinds of things are mentioned in both?" 
• "What if the informant who produced this text had been a woman instead of a man?" 
• "How similar is this text to my own experiences?" 
• "What does this remind me of?" 
• This often creates questions that lead to clarification with followup interviews with principle informants, or a new focus in continuing interviews.

5. Social science questions

Besides identifying indigenous themes—themes that characterize the experience of your informants—I'm also interested in how textual data illuminate questions of importance to social science. (theoretical importance).

• evidence of social conflict, cultural contradictions, informal methods of social control, things that people do in managing impersonal social relationships, methods by which people acquire and maintain achieved and ascribed status, and information about how people solve problems. 
• examining the setting and context, the perspectives of the informants, and informants’ ways of thinking about people, objects, processes, activities, events, and relationships. "
• ideas about gender, sexuality, the nature of sexual identity, the role of gender performance
• be sensitive to conditions, actions/interactions, and consequences of a phenomenon and to order these conditions and consequences into theories. 
• conditional matrix: a set of concentric circles, each level corresponding to a different unit of influence. At the center are actions and interactions. The inner rings represent individual and small group influences on these actions, and the outer rings represent international and national effects.
• be careful not to overfit your data – that is, find only that for which they are looking. 
• There is a trade-off between bringing a lot of prior theorizing to the theme-identification effort and going at it fresh. Prior theorizing, can inhibit the forming of fresh ideas and the making of surprising connections. But, theory-avoidance brings the risk of not making the connection between data and important research questions. 
• Novice researchers (like yourselves) may be more comfortable with the tabula rasa approach. More seasoned researchers, who are more familiar with theory issues, may find the social science query approach more compatible with their interests.

I am studying gendered performance, so in addition to my principle goal, which is to give voice to an informant's "story", I am always looking for elicited and observed information that sheds light on my research questions:

• what does all this say about gender and performativity
• how does this comment on the feminist critique?
• is drag inherently subversive?
• What is drag?
• What is femininity?

6. Searching for missing information

Instead of identifying themes that emerge from the text, search for themes that are missing in the text.

• A lot can be learned from a text by what is not mentioned. 
• Sometimes silences indicate areas that people are unwilling or afraid to discuss. 
• There are things that are difficult to ask for various reasons (direct questioning)
• Other times, absences may indicate primal assumptions made by informants-they leave out information that "everyone knows." (abbreviating) 
• looks for what is not said in order to identify underlying cultural assumptions. 
• searching for missing information is difficult. There are many reasons people do not mention topics. 
• avoiding sensitive issues 
• assuming investigator already knows about the topic,
• people may not trust you 
• people may not wish to speak when others are present 
• people may not understand your questions or may want to answer the way they think YOU want them too. (observer's bias)
• Distinguishing between when informants are unwilling to discuss topics and when they assume you already knows about the topic requires a lot of familiarity with the subject matter.

Using linguistic features of meaning such as metaphors, topical transitions, and keyword connectors to help identify themes.

7. Metaphors and analogies

People often represent their thoughts, behaviors, and experiences with analogies.

• Pay particular attention to informants' use of metaphors and the commonalities in their reasoning and explanations. 
• The object is to look for metaphors in rhetoric and deduce the schemas or scripts, or underlying principles, that might produce patterns in those metaphors. 
• schemas or scripts are what make it possible for people to fill in around the bare bones of a metaphor, so the metaphors must be surface phenomena and cannot themselves be the basis for shared understanding. 

8. Transitions

Another linguistic approach is to look for naturally occurring shifts in thematic content. 

• Linguistic forms of transition vary between oral and written texts. In written texts, new paragraphs are often used by authors to indicate either subtle or abrupt shifts in topics. In oral speech, pauses, change in tone, or particular phrases may indicate thematic transitions. 
• once  patterns are discovered (and markers of shifts-voice quality, tone, style, etc), it can be generalized and make you more sensitive to situations where they may be absent or more subtle.
• In two-party and multiparty speech, transitions occur naturally. In looking at conversation or discourse, you must closely examine linguistic features such as turn-taking, body language, speaker interruptions, and time holding the floor to identify transitions in speech sequences. 

9. Connectors

Look carefully at words and phrases that indicate relationships between things, to discover themes by searching groups of words and looking to see what kinds of things the words connect.

• Words such as: if or then, rather than, and instead of often signify conditional relationships. (or lack of certainty)
• The phrase: "is a" is usually associated with taxonomic categories (felt essential truths). 
• Time-oriented relationships are expressed with words such as: before, after, then, and next.
• Typically, negative characteristics occur less often than positive characteristics. So, simply searching for the words not, no, none, or the prefix non may be a quick way to identify themes. 
• Hale (1999): attributes (e.g., X is Y), contingencies (e.g., if X, then Y), functions (e.g., X is a means of affecting Y), spatial orientations (e.g., X is close to Y), operational definitions (e.g., X is a tool for doing Y), examples (e.g., X is an instance of Y), comparisons (e.g., X resembles Y), class inclusions (X is a member of class Y), synonyms (e.g., X is equivalent to Y), antonyms (e.g., X is the negation of Y), provenience (e.g., X is the source of Y), and circularity (e.g., X is defined as X).
• Metaphors, transitions, and connectors are all part of a native speaker’s ability to grasp meaning in a text. So, we tend to do this NATURALLY. By making these features (and our own analytical process) more explicit, we sharpen our ability to find themes.

Sometimes, theme discovery, requiring some physical manipulation of the text itself.

10. Unmarked texts

One way to identify new themes is to examine any text that is not already associated with a theme 

• This technique requires multiple readings of a text. 
• On the first reading, salient themes are clearly visible and can be quickly and readily marked with different colored pencils, sticky tabs or highlighters (I like colors). 
• In the next stage, the search is for themes that remain unmarked. 
• This tactic–marking obvious themes early and quickly—forces the search for new, and less obtrusive themes.

11. "Pawing"

I highly recommend pawing through texts and marking them up with different colored highlighter pens. 

• underlining key phrases because they make some (as yet not totally understood) sense-otherwise known as eyeballing. 
• In this method, you get a feel for the text by handling your data multiple times. (I have been known to print out my interviews, spread their them out on the floor, tack bunches of them to a bulletin board, and sort them into different file folders and -wait for patterns to hit me).
• This may not seem like a very scientific way to do things, but it is one of the best ways to begin hunting for patterns in qualitative data. Once you have a feel for the themes and the relations among, then we see no reason to struggle bravely on without a computer. Of course, a computer is required from the onset if the project involves hundreds of interviews, or if it’s part of a multi-site, multi-investigator effort. Even then, there is no substitute for following hunches and intuitions in looking for themes to code in texts (Dey 1993).

12. Cutting and sorting

Cutting and sorting is a more formal way of pawing and a technique I use quite a bit. It is particularly useful for identifying sub-themes. 

• The approach is based on a powerful trick most of us learned in kindergarten and requires paper and scissors. 
• First, read through the text and identify quotes that seem important. 
• Cut out each quote (making sure to maintain some of the context in which it occurred) and paste the material on small index cards. 
• On the back of each card, we then write down the quote’s reference—who said it and where it appeared in the text. 
• Then we lay out the quotes randomly on a big table and sort them into piles of similar quotes. 
• Then we name each pile. These are the themes. 
• An advantage to the cutting and sorting technique is that the data can be used to systematically describe how such themes are distributed across informants. After the piles have been formed and themes have been named, simply turn over each quote and identify who mentioned each theme.

Discussion

The variety of methods available for coding texts raises some obvious questions:

(1) Which technique generates more themes?

• there is no best method, but word-based techniques are easiest for novices

(2) When are the various techniques most appropriate?

• The choice of techniques depends minimally on the kind and amount of text, the experience of the researcher, and the goals of the project. 
• Word-based techniques (e.g., word repetitions, indigenous categories, and KWIC) are probably the least labor intensive. Word-based techniques are also the most versatile.  Given their very nature, however, they are best used in combination with other approaches.
• Scrutiny-based techniques (e.g., compare and contrast, querying the text, and examining absences) are most appropriate for rich textual accounts and tend to be overkill for analyzing short answer responses. If you are beginning to explore a new topical area, you might want to start with compare-and-contrast techniques before moving on to the more difficult tasks of querying the text or searching for missing information. If the primary goal of the this portion of the investigation is to discover as many themes as possible, then nothing beats using these techniques on a line-by-line basis.
• Linguist-based approaches are better used on narrative style accounts rather than short answer responses. Looking for transitions is the easiest technique to use, especially if the texts are actually written by respondents themselves (rather than transcribed from tape recordings of verbal interviews). Searching for metaphors is also relatively easy once you know what kind of things to look for in the texts. Looking for connecting words and phrases is best used as a secondary wave of finding themes, once you have a more definite idea of what kinds of themes you finds most interesting.
• In the early stages of exploration, nothing beats a thorough reading and pawing through of the data. It is particularly good for identifying major themes. The cutting and sorting techniques are most helpful. 
• An even more powerful strategy would be to combine multiple techniques in a sequential manner. 
• For example, you might begin by pawing through the data to see what kinds of themes just stick out. As part of this process, they might want to make comparisons between paragraphs and across informants. A quick analysis of word repetitions would also be appropriate for identifying themes at such an early stage of the analysis. If key words or indigenous phrases are present, you might follow-up by conducting more focused KWIC analyses. If the project is examining issues of gender and sexuality, for instance, you might also look for texts that are indicative of these things. Texts representing major themes can be marked either on paper or by computer. 
• You also might consider beginning by looking for identifying all metaphors and similes, marking them, cutting them out and sorting them into thematic categories. (I like this one)

(3) When do you know when you’ve found all the themes?

• There is no magic formula to answer this question. One strategy would be to interview people until some number of respondents in a row (say five or more) fail to mention anything new.
• another (my case) is to interview everyone you can (small sample) who has some knowledge as they emerge and then continually repeat the steps above.
• At some point you are willing to be DONE (there is always another study).