ABSTRACT
It is here that the research plan often starts to become vague and short on detail. Despite all the advice that appears in guides to research methods, that analysis should start early and go on throughout research, rather than be left until after all the fieldwork is completed, work on analysis and interpretation appear as something that occurs after any data collection phase, at least a year away, in some almost unimaginable territory. One of the difficulties facing qualitative researchers is that the processes involved tend
not to be visible in published research work. Some miracle seems to have happened between the mass of data that must have been gathered, and the printed page. As Ball (1994: 107) has observed, in addition to the mysteries of how the data were reduced through analysis, ‘Most analysts leave the interpretational relationships between data and analysis heavily implicit.’ In this chapter I consider what can be learned about data analysis from looking closely
at two examples of published research. The chapter starts with a brief overview of literature that offers guidance on data analysis. The second section of the chapter looks in detail at the two examples, in relation to what the reader can learn about the analytic processes that were involved. The final section offers a summary of key issues that arise in the chapter for carrying out data analysis.
