In all honesty, I'm actually making semi-okay progress with the discourse analysis part of my project. The biggest obstacle to me getting that part done is the fact that Nvivo appears to have been created by none other than Satan himself. It's not at all straightforward, the AU client software is terrible, the whole thing just stops working at random, and I've already had to start over once because the client doesn't make it at all clear where you're saving something and doesn't have a working search function to find it. That being said, I did find a tutorial and I feel like I might actually be about to start getting somewhere with it. I also had more success than I thought I would with finding data on fatalities and compiling that into a spreadsheet and getting the numbers I needed with it. ALSO I'm going to be eternally kicking myself because I didn't go through the IRB thing to actually get cleared to interview people because I didn't think that opportunity would present itself because I'm terrible at planning BUT when I was in Ireland I took a bus up to Belfast for a day and there was this thing that said political tour of Belfast and so I got on it and lo and behold the guy running it was actually a former IRA member who did time in the 80s and 90s and I got to talk to him about a lot of the things my project is touching on and wow I really should have talked to the IRB about this because alas I don't think I'll be able to use it in my project :'(
The problem I'm having now is that I don't know what would be the most meaningful way for me to incorporate the case study half of the research into the end product. I haven't gotten as far with it as I have with the discourse analysis and I still can't decide whether I should do process tracing, historical analysis, or both. I'm starting to feel like the stuff from the discourse analysis combined with the data on fatalities will do most of the answering the question and the case study stuff will be more supplemental. That being said, I don't know how to do the work with the case study and have it still meaningfully contribute something in the final paper. Any suggestions about that would be appreciated.
The problem I'm having now is that I don't know what would be the most meaningful way for me to incorporate the case study half of the research into the end product. I haven't gotten as far with it as I have with the discourse analysis and I still can't decide whether I should do process tracing, historical analysis, or both. I'm starting to feel like the stuff from the discourse analysis combined with the data on fatalities will do most of the answering the question and the case study stuff will be more supplemental. That being said, I don't know how to do the work with the case study and have it still meaningfully contribute something in the final paper. Any suggestions about that would be appreciated.
Hi Michaela! I too am doing discourse analysis and I did it by hand (the documents I did were relatively short) so I have no suggestions with Nvivo so good luck. BUT I did the IRB stuff and ended up literally only interviewing two people, so I can kind of help on that. I would say fill it out anyway and submit it if you want to try to use the interview you did if you got useful info out of it. They got back to me surprisingly quickly when I did it, but no promises. Also ask Professor Seybert if it would be ok to include it in the project but if you send it to get published somewhere I believe you would have to take it out, but I think for this project it would probably be fine. On the case study part of your post: I don't entirely know which would be better for your project but if you haven't done it already you should not do both process tracing AND historical analysis, you probably won't have time to do them both, so try to pick one. Also, just having it for supplemental stuff isn't a bad thing, it will only strengthen your argument. Good luck :)
ReplyDeleteSOS, I looked through the tutorial you posted in the Facebook group and have watched several other tutorial videos on the NVivo program and have yet to figure out how to access past projects. Each time I enter the program it prompts me for my name and initials, as if it's my first time using it, and have to start over. When I look at the folder where it was marked as saved the last time I used the program the project isn't there. How have you been able to find your previous works/save them within the program? Thanks :)
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