Research Process (in case anyone cares)

My process:
First, I transcribed data and made a few notes directly after transcribing. Read and re-read data in the context of the work of
Labbo
Smitherman
Dyson
Ball
Boykin
Vygotsky
I was looking for connections/extensions of previous research.
I came up with questions. For example? Why didn’t my students’ work look more like Dyson’s (or even my own work with students making web pages?) This is much of the early blog writing about the digital stories. I also sought answers to my research questions.

For the children themselves, I pulled all the data together and organized it per child. For instance, I made a profile of Bryce by pulling together all the data sources about him into a single summary. This has been much of the later blog writing.

I then began to compile the data across the profiles (cases). I called myself doing cross case analysis ala Stark. Starting with the pre-interviews, the “teacher talk” that the kids were doing when describing why they were “good story writers” was clear as a bell to me. And since I knew that there was other data that fit (their journals, the teacher questionnaires, the parent questionnaires) I could put that together to support my hypothesis that the students were high influenced by their interactions with teachers.

Is that last too much of a leap? From what I’ve read of cross-case analysis (very little… it’s new to me) you look at the data by type (such as pre-interviews)across the cases, and look for patterns that can be confirmed by other data. This is what I did. I don’t see where there was another step in there between examining the pre-interviews across the cases, and seeing an obvious pattern that can be confirmed by other sources.

Let me know if I’m missing something.

Marva S.