AN OVERVIEW OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS

MIRIAD MA Manchester Metropolitan University Dr. Barbara Rawlings

Contents
Page Introduction Overview of research process Finding, managing and writing about literature Collecting and managing data Analysing data Writing up References 10 14 16 18 2 2 4

Introduction The aim of this part of the course is to offer you a set of skills which you can use in the various inquiries you pursue during your MA programme. These are offered as a toolkit you may not want to use all the tools, but some of them will be just what you need to pursue your project. You may not know yet what you are going to do, but it helps to think about inquiry as a process, and to think through the parts of that process, while you are still casting around for ideas. I am going to describe the research process as having eleven stages. I will list these here, and then describe each one. You may not use all of these, or you may spend much more time on some than on others. Stage Stage Stage Stage Stage Stage Stage Stage Stage Stage Stage 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Gaining a general knowledge of the area Actively looking for information Formulating research questions Narrowing the literature search Refining the research questions Deciding on a research method Collecting the data Analysing the data Writing up Presentation Publication

Stage 1: Gaining a general knowledge of the area. You might do this by reading books, watching television, talking to people, working in a particular area of interest, or just picking information casually. This is a pre-research stage, where you begin to become interested in something, and know a little bit about it. Stage 2: Actively looking for information This is where you begin to deliberately go and look for books or articles about the subject you have become interested in. You might seek out people who know about the subject and go and ask them questions, or go onto the Internet and seek out more information. You might deliberately go to watch a particular film or play or television programme which is relevant. There are lots of ways you can learn more about the subject, and the more you focus on it, the more you will begin to learn. Your knowledge will start to become much deeper and richer than it was in Stage 2. Stage 3: Formulating research questions At some point during Stage 2, you may begin to wonder about questions yourself. Research questions can be quite broad. For example, it would be possible to carry out a research project which

aims to describe the work of community artists and to get the data for this by observing the whole process of how a community artist designs and implements a project with a community group. This would be a very qualitative and descriptive project. Or research questions can be quite focused. For example, one might decide to focus on a particular media, and aim to explore how other people have used it and to experiment with it yourself. Stage 4: Narrowing the literature search (contextualising your research) Once you have loosely decided on your research questions, you can become more focused in your reading and discussions with people. For example, if you are interested in the problems of community artists, you would want to look particularly about literature on community art projects, to see what other people have written. If you are interested in a particular media, you will look to see if there is literature on it. In particular, you need to know if other people have already researched your area, and if so, you need to know what they have found out and how that will affect your work. If the topic you are looking at is very new, the only literature available may be on the internet on websites or individual blogs. Stage 5: Refining the research question Often the research question gets refined several times in the course of research. Its a good idea to start out with a clear question, but if it turns out to be inappropriate or perhaps too broad or too narrow, you will need to change it. (Dont do this to often though or you will never finish the project!) Stage 6: Deciding on a research method Somehow or other you will need to pull together the information you need to answer the research question. You may get everything you need from books, or you may need to go out and do something observe people, become involved in an activity, interview people. There is no right way to do research you need to look at your research question and think about how to tackle it, and work out which research method would be best for this. Stage 7: Collecting the data Once you know how to collect the data, you can go out and get them. You may need to plan this stage carefully, to make sure that you collect the best quality data possible. Stage 8: Analysing the data Having collected the data, you will need to go through them to see what is there and work out some way of pulling the information together. Stage 9: Writing up

Most academic work consists entirely of text, or text with illustrations. Research in art departments often contains a large proportion of practical art work which enables ideas to be developed through image-making as well as writing. Even if you use a different medium to present your work, it is highly likely that you will be required to present a written report with it, which will contain your literature review, a description of your methodology, an outline of your findings and a discussion of these findings in relation to the pre-existing literature. Stage 10: Presentation Most research involves presentation of some kind. Often, research findings are presented in writing, but there may be many different or additional ways of presenting research findings in a subject area like art, such as holding an exhibition. It may also be possible to present a paper, poster or workshop at a conference in a relevant area (and this helps you discover other people working in the same area and develop networks.) Stage 11: Publication Research is meant to be disseminated to a wide audience. The best way to make sure that a lot of people learn from your work is by publishing a paper in a journal. Then the next time someone wants to research the area you have looked at, they will be able to read what you have written as part of their literature review.

Specific Research Skills

In this section I want to look more closely at four specific research skills: using the literature, collecting data, analysing data and writing up the report.

Finding, managing literature

and

writing

about

1. Finding the literature The first place to go for ideas about literature which will be relevant to your topic is a member of staff. Find out, by asking, which members of staff are likely to have some knowledge in your area, and go and speak to them. This is a good way to find out if there is a really important book or article which you absolutely must read. You can also ask whether there is a general introduction to the subject. Make sure that you find something which is up-to-date. You want something recent, because the writer will have used the most recent literature, and this should be in the bibliography or references section of the book or article.

Read (or skim) the recommended books or articles, and begin to make a list of the books or articles which they use and which seem relevant to your topic. (Read the section below on how to keep proper references to see how to do this). Your aim is to find the most relevant literature, and the most up-to-date literature, and not to miss anything really central to your interest. More sophisticated literature searches Today, it is possible to make sophisticated searches for books and articles using electronic methods. There are many electronic databases which cover particular areas such as humanities, arts, psychology etc. They allow you to search through vast numbers of books and articles fairly quickly by using keywords. Usually you can carry out this kind of search in the university library, where there will be librarians to help you get started. You can then save a list of relevant books and articles on to a disk, and refer to it whenever you need to. Many of these databases include quite long abstracts of the books or articles, and you can read these to see whether it is worth getting a copy of the original. If the books you want are not already in the library, you should be able to get them through interlibrary loan, and you can also order copies of journal articles or microfilms of PhD theses. (This part usually costs money). It is important to find out how to use the library and how to carry out an electronic search, and the librarians should help you with all this. 2. Reading the literature Now select the most useful looking books or articles from your list and read those. You do not have to read every word. You need to decide first if the book or article is relevant, and even when it is relevant, you may only need to read parts of it. It is worth looking at the contents lists at the beginning of the book, and looking at the abstract and the sub-headings of articles, so that you get an idea of what the work is about before starting to read. Then you may only need to read one or two sections. Or you may decide to read the whole thing. 3. Managing the literature Whenever you come across a reference, write out the full reference, and keep it safely with all your other references. You need to keep references and notes well organised, otherwise you will find yourself spending huge amounts of time trying to find things that you have mislaid or forgotten to write down later on in the writing up stage. The way you write a reference depends on whether its a book, an edited book, a chapter in an edited book, an article in a journal etc.

Here are some examples of the way to write out references for different kinds of literature. (If there is more than one author, you write them down in the order that they appear in the book or article) A book with one author: Denmark, John C., (1994) Deafness and Mental Health. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. London:

(You can find all this information on the title pages of the book. Try to use the authors full name, not just the initials, because if you ever do need to find the book again, it will be easier to locate it. When you write the list of references at the end of your report though, you need only put in the initials: e.g.: Denmark, J.C., (1994) etc.) An edited book: Boud, David, Cohen, Ruth, and Walker, David, (Eds.) (1993) Using Experience for Learning. Buckingham: Open University Press. A paper in an edited book: Brew, Angela (1993) Unlearning through Experience. In David Boud, Ruth Cohen and David Walker (eds.) Using Experience for Learning. Buckingham: Open University Press, pp. 87-98 (NOTICE THAT YOU MUST PUT THE PAGE NUMBERS IN IF ITS A CHAPTER AND NOT A WHOLE BOOK) An article in a journal: Cooper, Dave (2002) The Cotswold Community Therapeutic Communities, 23 (2) pp. 105-110 Farm. In

HERE, THE TITLE OF THE JOURNAL IS THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITIES AND IT IS VOLUME 23, ISSUE 2, PAGES 105-110 You may also find yourself using information you have found on the Internet. Although Internet pages often change and disappear, it is important to put the web address in, in full, which will appear on the printed pages (e.g.: www.findhorn.org/events/exspirit/exweek_new.php). If you want to quote something from any book or article, you MUST give the page number. It must be possible for someone else to find that exact quote by using your reference. So if you write out a quote ALWAYS add the page number. (This will save you even more time later on!)

I suggest that every time you open a book or an article, you fill out an index card with the full details on it.
Ryden, Michael 1989 Dyslexia: how would I cope? London Jessica Kingsley Publishers

Keep this in an alphabetical index box. Whenever you read anything, take some notes so that you remember what the book or article was about, and keep these notes in a separate ring binder. Make sure you head each page so that you know where the notes come from. Sometimes you may want to take a lot of notes, sometimes just a few. To save time, you could also photocopy or print out the abstract of an article, and keep this in your ring binder, and this will remind you later on about the main points. You must NEVER copy things straight out of other peoples work. This is plagiarism, and is regarded as a form of cheating in academic life. Sometimes it seems hard to find different words, but you must try. The trick of writing about the literature is to read it, absorb it, and then write out the main points in your own words. Sometimes though, you will want to quote another author. This is quite acceptable. When you are reading, and you se something you may want to quote, put it in quotation marks in your notes (to remind you that it is a quotation and not your own words) and ALWAYS put the page number next to it. Dont forget the page number, or you will find yourself later on hunting through whole books looking for the quote! 4. Writing about literature It is quite easy to get lost in a literature review, because different authors write about things so differently, and it seems hard to make a coherent statement about anything. Begin by reminding yourself about your research interest and your main research questions. Remember that you are writing the literature review in order to set a context for doing your research. You are not writing the definitive literature on everything you have read about.

Read through some of your notes and make a list of any points that seem important. How have other authors viewed the questions you are interested in? What are their main concerns? Look at this list and think about how you could write your literature review around it. To help you do this, read the next two ideas: IDEA 1 Plan the structure of your literature review. For example: (i) Introduction (why have you written this literature review and what do you aim to achieve by in?) (ii) Brief overview of the literature (what seem to be the main authors or views in this area? Is there a lot of literature or a little?) (iii) Summary of this overview (e.g.: A review of the literature has shown that there are three main areas of debate. These are X,Y and Z. The next three sections will cover each of these in detail. (iv) A section detailing the various things said about X (v) A section detailing the various things said about Y (vi) A section detailing the various things said about Z (vii) A summary which picks out the things you think are particularly interesting (given your research questions) (viii) A comment that no one yet has looked at what you are going to look at and a statement about how your research will contribute to the literature. (This is only a suggested framework. Try to devise your own, and keep it as simple as possible. If you work out beforehand how many words you want to use in your literature review, it will probably help you to save time writing too much.) IDEA 2 Use a mind map to work out the structure. This is explained in the section on data analysis. You could draw up a large mind map on a piece of A1 or A3, and add in the names of authors and arguments that you want to use at various stages in the review. Its very easy to do a mind map, and you can easily do 2 or 3 drafts before you settle on your final structure. Whatever approach you use, make sure that you spend time planning the structure. This will help you to stay on track when you write the review, and stop you from getting carried away and going off the point. There are different ways to refer to books or articles in academic texts. You need to put the surname, or surnames and the date in the text. You will have a list of references at the end of your report,

and anyone who wants to find the full reference can look it up there. These are the ways of putting references into the text: According to Yannis (2000) storytelling is a special skill. Yannis (2000) argues that storytelling is a special skill. Storytelling is a special skill (Yannis 2000). If there are two authors, cite them by surname: Organisations are full of secrets (Rothschild and Miethe 1994). Usually when there are more than two authors, you would write down the first name and just use et al for the others, e.g.: Boud et al (1993) write about the importance of active personal experience in learning. If several writers have made the same point, you sort these out into alphabetical order, like this. Therapeutic communities have proved highly effective in the treatment of serious drug addiction (Field 1989; Lipton 1983; Wexler and Graham 1993; Wexler et al 1990). If someone has written two things which have been published in the same year, and you want to put both of them in your review, call one of them a and one of them b e.g.: The 1990s saw a growth of interest in home maintenance (Smith 2003b) (Make sure that when you write up your list of references, you remember to make one of them 2003a and the other 2003b.) For a quotation, you need to put the name, date and page number in. There are two ways of doing this: Zukav (1979) provides a much clearer view of this difficult subject. classical physics says that there is one world, it is as it appears to be, and this is it. Quantum physics allows us to entertain the possibility that this is not so. (page 109) or, if you have not put the name and date in the preceding sentence:

classical physics says that there is one world, it is as it appears to be, and this is it. Quantum physics allows us to entertain the possibility that this is not so. (Zukav 1979 p.109) One last point is to say that if you like computers and you are like to read a lot of literature, you could investigate one of the computerised bibliographic databases that are now available. There are two that you could look for ENDNOTE and REFERENCE MANAGER. If you look these up on the Internet, you will be able to download a sample version that will last for 30 days so that you can try it out. You may be able to buy the software cheaply if your University supports it, so it is worth checking before you buy anything. A computerised database will keep all your references, search them by authors, keywords etc., keep your notes, and quotes, and you can download references and abstracts directly from electronic databases. You can also write papers using this software, so that any references you put into the text will be found and organised into a bibliography automatically.

Collecting data
Choosing a method The best way to choose your method is to think about what it is you want to look at, and what the most feasible and practicable approach would be. Your aim is to get the best data in the way which is least problematic, and to achieve a research report which will satisfy academic requirements of distance, originality and breadth of study. Participant observation Here the researcher is a participant in the group he or she is studying, and is thus able to collect data and to understand them in the way a member of the group might do. Usually the researcher keeps a record of observations by keeping notes. It can be time consuming, and sometimes hard to disengage from, as it is easy to feel part of the group and to begin to care about the group and the people in it. This can affect objectivity in research. Observation It is not always possible to become a proper participant. For example, it would be hard for an adult to become a participant in a group of children. It is better sometimes to think of being an observer, and having a slight distance from full participant status.

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Action research This is research conducted often by one of the leaders of a group (e.g.: a project manager might decide to conduct action research on the progress of the project). Here, the researcher has two distinct roles shaping and organising the project, and standing back to examine it. It can be very difficult for one person to do both things, and the urgency of organising often interferes with the need for quiet reflection. Someone carrying out action research really does need someone outside who will help him or her achieve a more distanced perspective. The other difference about action research is that often the results are fed back directly into the project in order to improve things. This means that the research itself is very obtrusive, since it is intended to alter the course of events Interviews Interviews may be held with individuals or groups. You may prefer to interview individuals, since people are often more forthcoming on their own, and feel more constrained in the company of others. Interviews can be simply casual conversations with people, or they can be fairly structured. This means designing a questionnaire beforehand, or sorting out a list of topics you want to cover. You may want people to give short answers, or you may prefer to get people talking in their own words as much as possible. . A good way to start an interview is to explain what your research is about, and then to ask a preliminary question like So when did you first hear about the plan to build a motorway through your back garden? Or How did you and your husband first meet? Or When did you first come to work for this company? This gives the respondent a chance to talk at length and this can set the tone for the whole interview. Rather than you having to interject questions all the time, you can leave them to talk and just bring the topic back to the main subject now and again. The list of topics does not need to stay exactly the same for everyone you interview. As you get on with the research, you can drop some questions and ask new ones, depending on what you are finding out. The process of qualitative research involves you learning about the area you are studying through your research and finding new questions to ask and new areas to concentrate on. Also, you will need to tailor your list of topics to suit the people you are interviewing. (For example, you might ask a prisoner how he feels the experience of being locked up has affected him and ask the prison officer how he thinks the experience of incarceration affects people, or how he has been affected by the experience of working in a prison.) Semi-structured interviews may take 1-3 hours, or even more if the subject is particularly sensitive or absorbing. You may want to interview someone once,
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or several times to get the full story. Or you may need to interview a person two or three times over a period of time in order to see how things have changed for them. Focus groups These are useful if you want a general introduction to a subject, because they encourage people to talk between themselves and give you the opportunity to listen in and ask questions. Although focus groups are artificially created by the researcher, they offer the chance for natural talk to develop. Usually the researcher brings together a number of people with a particular interest or expertise or experience (e.g.: airport protesters, widows, elderly people, entrepreneurs) and asks them a very small number of questions (e.g.: how do you spend your day? or what do you find most difficult? The researcher acts as a facilitator, asking odd questions to keep the conversation moving and to keep it on track, and acts as timekeeper, to make sure the areas all get covered. Usually focus groups are tape-recorded and transcribed afterwards. Otherwise, a researcher could take notes, or record what is said on a flip chart so that the group can see it and comment on it. There is a possibility that people say different things in focus groups than they would say in an interview, because of peer pressure. When designing a project with focus groups, you may want to include some individual interviews to check on this. If people do behave differently, it does not necessarily mean that interviews provide better data than focus groups. Rather, it simply shows that people talk differently in different settings. Documents Research documents are usually anything on paper (or on an electronic medium) which you can use as data. Unless your research is a literature review, it does not usually include the books and papers you read on the subject. Documents for research fall into two main categories: (i) naturally occurring documents, which includes any documents generated by the group you are studying, such as memos, letters, emails, web-sites, reports, timetables, plans, minutes of meetings, designs, photographs etc. (ii) documents generated for the research include anything you ask the people you are studying to write, draw, photograph etc. You might ask people to keep a record of what they do with their time over the course of a day or a week or to keep a diary. Recording data Taking notes

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Taking notes in a notebook is easy, but highly visible. Writing notes also makes it difficult to maintain eye contact, which is important in interviewing, since it encourages people to talk. Some researchers prefer to rely on their memory, and write notes up afterwards. It is important to write notes up quickly or you will forget details the sooner you write up, the more you will remember. If you are conducting several interviews, leave time in between each one to write up some quick notes, otherwise you will forget who said what. An alternative to writing is to use a small dictaphone to record your observations and memories, and transcribe the tape as soon as possible. Tape-recording Some people object to being tape-recorded, so even if you intend to taperecord an interview or a meeting, be prepared to take notes instead. Make sure you have a good microphone, and a good tape recorder, and good quality tape, so that the end product is as clear as possible. Always check to make sure the machine is recording check it before you go to the interview, and check it once you have switched it on. Try not to use a tape recorder that is voice activated, since this will stop every time there is a pause in the talk, and swallow up the next word. You might want to buy an external microphone if you are recording a group, rather than relying on the internal microphone in the recorder. Be careful about other noises people talking in another part of the room or air-conditioning or outside traffic noise, as the microphone may well pick this up and drown out the talk you are trying to record. Afterwards, make sure the recording is properly labelled, with names, title of meeting or interview and date. You may not need to transcribe entire interviews (this is long, hard work) but you should play the interview through once after you have made the recording and write down a brief outline of who is speaking and what is being talked about. Then at least you will be able to find the part you need. Before you decide to tape-record your data think carefully about what you mean to do with them. You could run the risk of overloading yourself with data which you never have the time to listen to or use. Or maybe you will just use it to jog your memory, which could be very helpful if you have to do a lot of interviews close together. You will always need to ask permission to tape record, as people can be sensitive about this. Many people will want an undertaking from you that you will keep these tapes safely locked up and that no one else but you, and perhaps your supervisor, or research colleagues, will listen to them. They may also want you to wipe the recordings at the end of the project. Video recording For some projects which involve movement as a central topic, video-recording can be useful. Video is also useful for recording group behaviour, such as in a meeting or a therapy group.

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However, video is often very intrusive, and people tend to be much more selfconscious about video than about tapes or notes, and it takes them longer to forget it is there. Before you decide to use video, think carefully, and if is it not vital, do not use it. There are practical disadvantages with video as well. Often the quality is poor. The microphone is often on the camera, and this can give poor quality speech (although you could use an external microphone to remedy this. If the light is too dim or too bright, picture quality is lost. If there is too much additional noise (people talking or even loud air conditioning) talk can be drowned out on the video altogether. It is much harder to transcribe a video than an audiotape, because of all the visual information. Like tape recordings, you should set the counter on 000 and write up a description of what happens on the tape, so that you have an easily accessible record. Managing data It is very important that you devise some system of keeping your data in reasonable order so that they are reasonably easy to access. You also need to make sure they are legible or audible. It is a good idea to invest in filing boxes, or keep data in filing cabinets, and to keep a good index of where everything is. If everything gets out of hand, stop and think about what you are trying to do. Are you taking on too much? Will you ever use all this stuff? After all, this is your research project, and you are more or less inventing it as you go along, and there is no law which says you absolutely must keep and use every little bit of information which comes your way. When you have finished you will probably realise you have only used a fraction of the information you collected. Managing your time An important early step is to plan your project so that you have the time to not only collect the data, but to go over them, write them up if necessary, and file them away. A one-hour interview might take 3-4 hours to write up, so you should try not to book more than 2 one-hour interviews a day at the very most. Sometimes you have to, e.g.: if you travel some distance and need to interview several people in a short period of time. In that case, make sure you have free days as soon as you get home to sort all the data out. Transcribing audio and video recordings As soon as you can, listen to the recording and write down an outline of what is on it. You do not need to transcribe every word (in fact this is often a great waste of time) but you should make a record of what is on each one, so that it is easier for you to find things again. Do this by setting the recording and the number counter at 000 and as you listen to it and write down a description of

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what is being said, you can put the number at the side of the page. Then you should be able to find a particular point again reasonably accurately.

Analysing the data

Coding The usual way to analyse qualitative data is to go through them and see what sort of categories of information or activity is recorded there. You can give these categories names (e.g.: jokes, talking about money, problems with the boss, plans, stories about things going wrong etc.) This is very basic coding, and you may find that you have already started to do this when you were transcribing and indexing your research notes. Essentially, you will be looking to see what the main themes are. This is known as thematic analysis, and it is a good way of getting to know your data and allowing the ideas to come through. This coding will give you a rough idea of what kinds of things stand out about your research. What you need to do next is to look at each of these broad categories in much more depth. For example, how do people talk about money? Is it seen as a problem or an opportunity? A constraint or a minor irritation? Do the things people say with regard to money change depending on the circumstances are they perhaps privately worried but publicly confident that things will go right? You might look at all the examples you have of people talking about money and decide that money seems to play a major part in this area. Or that actually, now that you look closely, you see that its not money people are talking about, but the inconsistent behaviour of funding bodies or the difficulties of managing a budget, or the poor quality of some piece of equipment. It is only by looking carefully at the data that you can begin to make discoveries like this. This is a good stage to use outside help talk to your supervisor or someone who will ask nave questions, and see if that gives you a lead in all this There are two helpful ways of sorting all these categories out. One is to develop typologies. How many different types of something can you find (e.g.: types of joke, types of meeting, types of employee? You often find that when people talk, they use implicit typologies (e.g.: they might talk about someone as always being late, which suggests that its also possible to be always on time or always early). If you ask yourself what kind of typologies people are using, or construct your own typologies of events or people or activities, you can begin to bring some order into your coding. You must be careful not to impose these typologies if they are not already there in the data you do not want to conceal what you have found out, you want to display it. The second method is to think in terms of species and sub-species. You might have a category like talking about money and when you look at it, you see that there are a number of sub-species in this category such as useless bank manager profits versus fun dislike of book-keeping and plans to attract funding. You might look at these and decide that they are not all simply discrete sub-species, but that you can cluster them into groups.

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Maybe then you can give the groups headings: money as a problem and money as an opportunity, and see how this helps you to understand the data. You might also look at the category of talking about money and realise that its a sub-species of a higher category called talking about resources. Organising categories into species and sub-species is not a hugely scientific method not when it is used in this way but it gives you a way of processing the data which can bring you closer to understanding what you have got. It can be very useful here to use the mind map method pictured here for sorting data out. If you draw a shape like this on a large piece of plain paper, and write a title name in the central circle, you are immediately forced to think in terms of things that are similar and things that are different.

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Each spoke can be used to represent a category, and you can draw little spokes off the main spokes, and even smaller ones off those, to represent sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, like this:

And so on. And if it doesnt work, you can throw it away and try a different mind map. You can use colours and drawings anything to help you think.

Writing up
Link with analysis The work of analysing qualitative data and writing them up overlaps. Indeed, it is best to think of writing as an analytic technique, because this will give you some idea of the amount of time it will take. Also, this will encourage you to start writing early. Many people put off writing for as long as possible, out of reluctance to
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commit themselves to paper. It is much better to dive in and write something early, and get a feel for what it feels like and what it does to your data. Structuring the report Whilst you are carrying out the analysis, you begin to get an idea of what the overall shape of the final report will look like. It can be helpful to draw up a plan of the chapters for the final report, and list what information will go into each one. Having an idea of what you are aiming towards can feed back into the analysis, and give it shape and direction. A standard structure might be like this: Introduction background and history to the research Literature review analysis of books, articles, papers relevant to the topic Methodology a description of what you did and why you chose that approach, supported by literature on methods. Findings this will be the main part of the report, describing what you have learnt. Discussion this where you can draw things together, and produce some overall descriptions of what you have found. You can bring in some of the literature you described earlier here, since by this time you may have found that your work supports or disagrees with earlier studies. Assessment some studies end with an evaluation of the project, and a set of recommendations for future activity Future research these are avenues you have not had time to explore, but feel would be worth looking at another time. You do not need to get this structure right first time. The activity of writing up usually includes a lot of false starts, and then a lot of switching things around from one section to another. Providing evidence and examples All research requires evidence, to show that the things you are saying about the subject matter are rooted in the world you have been observing, and are not just ideas you have had. Providing examples from notes or tapes is a very powerful way of giving evidence. You need to careful about two things: (i) (ii) that the example clearly fits the aspect of the topic you are talking about that the meaning of the example is made absolutely clear to the reader (if it includes slang or local expressions these need to be explained)

If your quotes are very long, you need to look at them again, pick out a choice phrase or two, and paraphrase the rest. Linking back to theory
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The whole (academic) point of research is to contribute to theory, so the link with theory is a critical part of the research. During your project, you examined a particular topic, and so you need to show what you have taken from pre-existing knowledge of the topic and what you can now contribute. You have also used a particular set of methods, and so you are in a position to comment on pre-existing methodological debates and perhaps add to them. Thus there are at least three ways in which your research could link back to the theoretical concerns of other writers. (i) If you have explored similar avenues to other writers, you may be able to comment on the usefulness of their writing for understanding your own topic. Did the things they observed in their study, occur in your study? If not, what might account for the differences? Did you have similar problems, and did you find ways round them? (ii) You may have used a pre-existing theoretical perspective to explore your data. If you have done, then you will probably have discovered things about your own data which you would not have looked at otherwise, and also you may have added new things to the theoretical perspective. (iii) Has your research filled a gap in the literature, and if so, how does this help our general understanding of things?

References
Many of the books written about research methods are written for and by social scientists. You will need to adapt some of the things they say to your own needs, but most of the information in them will be relevant.

Bailey, Carol A., (1996) A Guide to Field Research. Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge Press. (This is probably my favourite out of all of these. It is very helpful, and has a lot of really interesting examples.) Becker, Howard S. (1986) Writing for Social Scientists: how to start and finish your thesis, book or article. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (This is not essential, but quite good to read, nice cartoons and useful if you think you will have trouble actually getting down to writing)

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Bell, Judith, (1987) Doing Your Research Project: a guide for first time researchers in education and social science. Buckingham: Open University Press. (This is really good, fairly simple, quite short, and if you only read one book on research methods, this would be the one to choose.) Burgess, Robert G., (1984) In The Field: an introduction to field research. London: Unwin Hyman. (Useful and interesting chapters on how to do things, like interviews, observation and analysis.) Morgan, David, (1997) Focus Groups as Qualitative Research. Sage: Thousand Oaks, California. (If you decide to use focus groups, read this as it is fairly short but contains valuable information to help you avoid making mistakes.) Moustakas, Clark, (1990) Heuristic Research: design, methodology and applications. London: Sage Publications. (This is the book to read if you are thinking of using your own practice and experience as a research topic). Rose, Gillian, (2001) Visual Methodologies. London: Sage. (This is really a book about research in art, photography and film, but it may well be useful if you are looking at visual aspects of presentations and performance.) Schn, Donald (1991) The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. Aldershot: Arena, Ashgate Publishing. (This is the other book to read if you are thinking of using your own practice and experience as a research topic. It contains some interesting case studies, but not so much information on how to do the research as you will find in the book by Moustakas). Yin, R.K., (1989) Case Study Research: design and method. Newbury Park CA: Sage. (A very practical book on writing case studies. Worth dipping into for ideas and good advice.)

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