A masterclass with Professor Paul Atkinson.

If you work through this resource from start to finish, doing everything, it will take about 4 hours. You can of course take it in smaller steps and also repeat elements of it at any time.

Many people find working with data and generating an analysis from data to be daunting aspects of the research process. If you have collected data, but are wondering what to do with it, or are not sure how to set about analysis, this course will provide you with some guidance and some ‘safe’ experience using a particular approach. It involves working with some real data that has been edited and anonymised.

In the following video (46 mins) Professor Paul Atkinson discusses the principles and processes of analytic induction (sometimes known as grounded theory) and introduces the data that will be used in the exercise. This is derived from ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Julius Roth in a TB hospital in the American midwest.

Watch the video above, then put yourself in the role of a member of the research team analysing the data that has been collected. Look at day 1 and derive what you think are useful, plausible and productive lines of enquiry to develop. You can download the data as a PDF (140kb) using the following link.

The TB Hospital Ethnographic Field Notes by Julius Roth, edited by Paul Atkinson

Do:

• Treat the data at face value (even though it is historical data and the
  treatment for TB has changed).
• Focus on the texture, what¹s going on, and what we can think about as
  social scientists.
• Try to find themes and potential research directions, rather than just
  doing content analysis.

Don¹t:

• Focus on whether you like or dislike the people involved.
• Conclude ‘It’s all about X’ or try to produce definitive answers.
• Try to summarise and condense the data.

In the second video (60 mins) Professor Atkinson asks the groups, who have been spent an afternoon analysing the data, to identify various themes.

Watch the video and compare your own findings to those discussed among the group.