Self-Generated Data

I have called this chapter ‘Self-generated data’ because I wanted to find some way of lumping together research methods in which the participants are responsible for generating data that require more input than simply ticking boxes or circling numbers on a Likert scale. Of course, it could be argued that interviewees provide most of the data in an interview study, but spoken information only becomes data once it is recorded and transcribed by the researcher – hence it becomes, to cite a glib phrase, ‘creata’. In the techniques described in this chapter, participants actually go off and create data themselves, and the researcher (apart from initiating the data collection itself) only becomes involved at the analytical stage.