First cycle coding: Qualitative data from survey

Good day!

I can't believe it! I thought I have posted something last month (April) but... Oh! dear. One possible excuse that I can think of right now: I'm a temporary single mom (TSM)! As a TSM, I have multi-task to manage - Studying, cooking, grocery shopping, driving kids to childcare and back home, washing dishes & clothes, doing laundry, etc... As a result, I tend to be forgetful and stressful.

With excuse or no excuse, let me update you with my current work-in-progress. Last month, I was so busy trying to finish preparing my interview transcripts (verbatim). Oh! My God! It was such a daunting experience! Luckily, I just got 12 interviews. I can't imagine how am I going to cope if I were to prepare more than 12 transcripts. It would be a total nightmare, I guess. So, on the 10th of May, I managed to finished the task. Congratulations to myself because it was 2 days earlier than the deadline that I set for myself. As a celebration to my small victory, I totally avoided work and attended one academic function called 'Global Education Systems Day 2010' in Building 68. Not bad because I was one of the organising committe members of the event - the MERC/Monash Education Research Community.

Then, on the 12th of May, my journey to analyse the qualitative data from my survey started. For your information, my qualitative data come from two sources: the open-ended questions (OEQ) from my survey questionnaire and interviews. In my survey (mostly in Section C), I have 5 'pure' and 7 'comment-like' open-ended questions that I need to analyse. Imagine how many statements that I need to code? 508 participants times (x)12 open-ended questions equal (=) 6096 statements (roughly)!!! I am killing myself. Indeed, I am. At the moment, I have finished analysing 9first cycle coding) 3 of the 'pure' OEQs. Mind you, it was so challenging because this is the first time in my life that I'm using NVivo 8 to analyse qualitative data. As a novice and a beginner, I am too slow. I bumped into so many roadblocks but I kept on going. I made a note in my so-called 'analytic memo' of my questions, issues, or concerns and I hope one day, I'll have the answers. My plan is 'to continue doing the first cycle coding' for the rest of the OEQs and then do the second cycle coding. This is a wise decision because at this moment, I haven't got a clues how to do second cycle coding using NVivo 8!!!

The truth is, at this moment, I prefer doing research using a quantitative approach rather than qualitative one simply because I love numbers! But, at the same time, it's kind of fun learning and experiencing something new in my PhD journey. Afterall, having two flavours (quantitatively and qualitatively) contributes to better taste than simply have one flavour to research. Right?

So, let the journey continue...till next time.

Preparing 12 Interview Transcripts (February - May 2010)

I thought I have planned well. I thought everything has been taken care of. I thought I didn't have to bother about preparing the interview transcripts, but as a saying like this -"always expect the unexpected"- is something that I cannot avoid. As I read my initial transcripts prepared by my so-called RA, I noticed a lot of errors - more than 60% error. So, I had to re-do the whole transcripts so that I can prepare my interview data for analysis. So, it took me about 4 months to prepare my interview transcripts.

The Good - I managed to immerse myself in the richness of my interview data. I know everything about my interviewees - their personal background, the professional involvement in counselling, their perceptions and experiences regarding multicultural counselling, their challenging cases, their ways of doing counselling with culturally different clients, their barriers and challenges in the practice of counselling, and their tips and recommendations. I know and I can memorise their lines - any useful and interesting quotes. So, although it was a daunting experience for me when trying to revise the whole transcripts (revise = re-do the whole thing), I treasure the moment and the challenges. at least I know how does it felt when preparing transcripts for qualitative data analysuis. It's totally suck!

The Bad - I hate doing interview transcripts! No more doing transcripts after this PhD. No more! It was such a time-consuming task! It delayed my 'constructive' work because I had to listen to the audio.digital recording and type. Such a boring routine. I truly madly deeply hate the whole process of preparing the interview transcripts!