ABSTRACT
The first thing we may do after creating and assigning categories to the data is consider ways of refining or focusing our analysis. To do this, we can shift attention from the ‘original’ data itself to the data as reconceptualized through the results of our labours. By this point, we have reorganized our data (or at least some of it) around a category set, which we may have created, modified and extended during our preliminary analysis. In the process we have also ‘produced’ a (probably very large) number of databits which have been assigned to one or more of the various categories used in our analysis. Therefore we can now organize and analyse our data in terms of the categories which we have developed. This shift in focus has been described as a ‘recontextualization’ of the data (Tesch 1990), as it can now be viewed in the context of our own categories rather than in its original context.
