ABSTRACT

INTERPRETATION AND ORGANISING IDEAS The rst thing to emphasise is that interpretation and analysis don’t come at the end of the research process-they happen all along the way. Every time you ask a question and hear an answer, or all the time you’re observing some situation, you are taking it in and working on it in your mind-thinking ‘What does this mean?’, ‘What am I hearing?’, ‘How does this seem to answer our questions?’ For this to be good research, you need to be more aware of this all-important process of re ection. Alongside the written data (such as people’s own words, or on a questionnaire, and so on) or at the end of a discussion or an interview or a day’s interviewing or while reading the questionnaires, you could write down your own thoughts, interpretations and analysis-perhaps in another colour ink, or put in square brackets. Then leave them to one side until you’ve talked with everyone, heard everyone else’s views and ‘all the data is in’.