Starting over....

Last week, I said I'd read about 80% of Patton's 3rd edition of Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods. Yesterday, I finished his chapter on qualitative data analysis. (I think he might have written it just for me.) He said just exactly what I needed to hear. Tuesday and Wednesday, I worked through an Atlas.ti tutorial and read the full-blown 417-page manual. (That's unusual for me. I much prefer digging in and trying to figure things out on my own.) Thanks to the insights from those two sources, I trashed all the analysis I'd done so far.

That's not as bad as it sounds. Now I've got a much more organized and coherent frame for the coding. I understand better how I can use these codes for analysis. I believe I'm going to have a pretty rich saturation for my theoretical framework. (Imagine how rich it will be after I collect the second round of data!) Knowing the data as I do, and re-thinking the codes has helped me see a richness in the data I collected at Mason State that I hadn't fully appreciated until now. I'm very excited!

But there's more! Now that I know more about the software (a well-written manual is amazing that way), I can catch up pretty quickly. For example, I was able to easily import the code list (I started making using Inspiration on my Mac) into Atlas.ti on my Windoze laptop. It was, quite literally, as easy as drag and drop. I was also able to auto-code all of the speakers' data with just a few clicks per speaker. Auto-coding isn't a substitute for manual coding, but when it's appropriate, it's FAST, leaving my time free to focus on the more important stuff. THAT is how a computer ought to be used!