ABSTRACT

In the previous chapter a number of conclusions was drawn based upon the analysis of fieldnotes and the interactions of teachers and pupils during four video-taped lessons. In pursuing this analysis there could be, as French (1990:42) argues, a tendency ‘to ascribe more significance than is strictly speaking justified, to impute unwarranted motives and intentions to participants and then to put one’s understandings forward implicitly or otherwise as the only possible way of interpreting the data’. French suggests that to avoid the danger of over-interpretation it is necessary for the researcher to produce more than one hypothesis to explain the data. She describes, as an example, some research carried out by French and French (1984) where four possible hypotheses were put forward to account for the fact that boys appeared more likely to have the rules and norms of classroom contact explained to them than girls. Teachers were asked to examine the four possible explanations and to comment on them. Drawing on this experience French (1990) argues that it may not always be possible to arrive at a definitive account which can explain such interactions although it is often likely that one of the explanations will appear more plausible to teachers than the others.