During the last couple of days, am trying to organise the data i have gathered through research interviews and start working on data analysis more systematically. What i see as needing to do is:

- listen to the recordings as am reading the transcripts and make any grammar and content corrections

- see what themes stand out in the first instance

- send transcripts back to interviewees, together with any emerging comments that would potentially generate more reflections in a post-interview phase

From the very beginning of my research, i was aware (and still am!) of the fact that my topic raise issues that are hard to put into words and this is why i often feel as if ‘i do not really have any data’, although i have a good number of recordings.Now i am in the phase of getting into the words/text of my research and try to make sense of it as well as attempt to make a syntheiss at a later stage…all this needs a lot of discipline and i shall keep having a rythm of working that can contain all this process

My fellow student S. has posed via email the following very interesting question:

“What do you think the difference is between: a therapeutic interpretation of what is being heard by the therapist and a methodological interpretation of text being read by the researcher? It is not a trick question”

Our supervisor has answered as follows:

“The big difference is the intention. I would expect a therapeutic interpretation to be part of the client’s moving on therapeutically, so how it timed and how it is said etc all crucial as well as actual content. In research it has to convince the reader – right language, right references, good rhetoric, add a dash of surprise to keep the reader awake e.g. use of images, unusual references, language, puns etc, so it has to work as text whilst the therapists has to work embodied“

 I found this very important to keep in mind, especially when we know that as counsellors (especially those following relational models) we are used to bring a lot ourselves in the dynamic, we are not detached whilst operating within certain boundaries. the researcher and the data also form a ‘relationship’, which however has different dynamics, difficult to put into words though. So, the interpretations we make of the data, in order to ‘work as text’ as William is suggesting, seems to me that it requires this kind of ’synthesising’ angle that reveals the phenomenon under investigation as much vividly as possible

I was sent an interesting article about thematic analysis that i shall definitelly look at and use it as i will be working on the interview transcripts. Here is the reference, before i forget!
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101.