ABSTRACT
Quantitative researchers often confess to “mining” their data, referring to going through data again and again to see if there is anything of interest that they might have missed in earlier efforts to comb through it. I don’t sense that qualitative researchers follow a similar practice. Their work with data tends to be cumulative. But as the preceding chapter relates a personal experience of ethnography, I feel that I should reflect on some points that may have been passed over too quickly or, because of their importance, not emphasized sufficiently. So let me sift back through the account to both “mine” and “mind” the lesson(s) of the previous chapter in order to emphasize some subtle points that warrant more careful attention.
