You gave your presentations on the analysis of the ethnographic notes you took as a class. The protocol for presentations was as follows.
1. identify your question
2. provide a general overview of your findings in terms of a general answer to the questions
3. list the categories of your analysis (the main ideas that organize the different points of your answer)
4. discuss the particular findings relevant to each category, including a discussion of the essential features of that category.
5. give examples from the data to support the discussion of each category
You did a great job on these presentation. In general, you are doing well at identifying the question, formulating an answer relevant to the answer, and overall general patterns (or one example) to suggest that your answer is "right". OK. So far so good. To make an analysis that really works, you will need to do some counting (how many times does the pattern you identify show up? is it a significant number of times?) => once you have identified "dominant patterns" => then do some more analysis to see if there is a feature/factor that explains why something happens sometimes, but not other times.
For example, in the presentation on what the notes showed about the social dynamics of the group, the researchers noticed both that participants asked "getting to know you" questions, and that they gravitated toward individuals they knew. This is a good observation. Some "counting" and more detailed describing to support these observations would strengthen the analytic "persuasiveness". Good work here.
At the end of class we summed up what we have learned so far, and it sounds to me like you are just about ready to try your hand at your own research project. And that's good, because we are almost there.
For next class:
Read: Data Set 3 (posted to the right)
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