ABSTRACT
The involvement of community members in analysis and the creation of themes is less covered in the literature than methods, ethics and principles of research. Thomas and O'Kane, also working with young people, felt the key was to make data analysis physical, pictorial and 'fun', in keeping with the non-verbal approach of much participatory research. The chapter discusses different traditional techniques of data analysis, and how they related to their organic ways of making sense of the world, community members often grasped the fundamentals of data analysis quite quickly, and even had many critiques of the approaches. To give an example of a changed recommendation, a recommendation from a piece of research into client participation in a homeless service was for training service users in engaging with the management committee's processes as the service users did not feel fully equipped to do so.
