Methodology

Within this chapter, we will identify the limitations of the data and the methodological issues that surfaced in the individual site descriptions. Throughout the project we worked collaboratively to decide which of our research methods would be common and where we would differ. We had specific methodology related to our collaboration, and this will be discussed in “Data Analysis 2: How do Practitioners do Collaborative Research?” We had face-to-face meetings and work sessions, and we discussed issues and questions over email and via teleconference.

We agreed to work with the same general participant group, and as a team decided who we wanted to interview. We each had our own design for contacting and arranging for participants appropriate to our communities. We discussed for a long time what our definition of “little formal education” should be. Our final decision was that participants would be:

• Adults age 19 or older
• Who had not completed Grade 12 or who had a modified Grade 12
• Who were not now participating in a learning program

We collaboratively designed one interview protocol. Although no two interviews were the same (as no two open-ended interviews ever are), much of the same content was covered at each site. There were some common questions including those related to going on a trip, finding information on a disease and identifying an area where the participant wanted to learn more. We taped the interviews and then took detailed notes from the tapes often marking areas of interest to look back at later. We then had a teleconference to discuss what had emerged from the data. We looked at the question of gender differences, but did not see any differences in terms of the kinds of strategies male and female participants chose. However, we noted that the usual gender and racial biases in our society applied to the lives of our participants, and we comment on these biases in the section on agency. Working from the data, we then determined key themes and coded those themes with numbers that we all used to mark our interviews. We each typed our participants’ comments in table form and coded our own data and then sent these tables, each several pages in length, to the rest of the team.

We then decided which team member would be responsible for which theme or themes. These decisions were based primarily on personal interest. Each of us read all the interviews from the other sites, and then read again for our themes those already coded and those still hidden in the data. At this point most of us had written a first draft and included some of the quotes we wanted to use. We circulated these drafts and each of us went back to our tapes for verbatim transcriptions for each quote that was present in this draft.

Circulating the drafts of our individual sections provided us with a good feel for where the entire project was headed and our individual data’s place in that progress. Team members provided honest and sometimes brutal feedback, “pushing” each other on content and analysis. This further increased the “ownership” of the entire project to the entire team.