Understanding Research (33 page)

We now turn to the role and specifics of analysis; an integral yet often under-discussed aspect of successfully completing a research project, let alone how this process operates within particular methodological traditions. Ways of going about gathering material and then analysing it are intimately connected. Yet the quality of final reports rated as above average often lies in the strength of the analysis sections; tables of survey results, chunks of interviews cited verbatim, focus-group transcripts, large quotes
from the thinker under investigation, or chapters of descriptive prose based on field-work observation are not sufficient in themselves. They all require an analytical dimension. Yet this is where many student projects can suffer from a lack of attention to this aspect; running out of time and ‘oomph’ playing a major role here.

The chapter has a dual aim: (1) to deal with a broader question that often goes begging for many students: what
is
‘analysis’? and (2) to unpack a cluster of methodological approaches in which analysis plays a key role. These relate to the data-gathering techniques covered in
Chapter 6
as well as departing from them. As analysis is a stage most of us encounter later on in a project, or we are confronted with the limits of our understanding and ability to make sense of more literature-based material as we write, the rest of this chapter looks at corollary issues that arise at this point. With generating or gathering ‘raw data’, the focus of the last chapter, we see in the discussion here that ways to approach and then ‘process’ material can produce different sorts of outcomes and accompanying claims of how these critique, or contribute to existing knowledge.

Issues raised here may catapult some readers back to the start; though by now you will be looking back from further down the research road, for better or worse. Others will notice here that they have reached another set of crossroads, where distinctions between analysing and presenting quantifiable and qualitative material require you to make another set of decisions. The power lies in knowing why you are making these choices and being able to deal with the consequences for what you can claim at the end of the day as well as the selections that come with writingup (
Chapter 8
).

Now that you have a clear research question, have isolated what your object of inquiry (the ‘what’) is, done the lion’s share of data-gathering – whatever that entails – the next level is sifting and sorting all this material in order to make sense of it, to yourself but more importantly to shape it in some coherent way for public consumption. What you are entering is the
analysis
phase, a portal through which you pass in order to construct an argument and make it stick as you present your
findings
and draw conclusions about the inquiry. It is at this moment that many a research student often finds themselves leaving a supervision session or seminar presentation with the words ‘go analyse this’ ringing in their ears.

It is a truism as well that there is more than one way to analyse something; interpretation and analysis are synonyms in many respects (see Harding 1987, Ulin 1984, van Zoonen 1994). Moreover, different modes and
levels of analysis
can lead to distinct if not conflicting outcomes or conclusions based on the same evidence, along with the consequences when these interpretations are then translated into action.

Whatever term we may give it, this phase is when a researcher puts their stamp on the project, makes sense of their material in an original way, however understood. For some modes of research, analysis is synonymous with codified ‘rules and procedures’. For others it is tantamount to writing and reflection; the upshot being how effectively and convincingly you can convey the outcome of these reflections to the reader. At the end of the day, for the purposes of completing an academic dissertation, you are looking to make and sustain an argument in a written account of what you did, how, why, and with what sort of outcome.

Even when talking about modes of inquiry identified with
philosophical research
, the primary material referred to here comes in the form of ideas and meanings, usually in written, sometimes multimedia, and increasingly visual
texts
; from philosophical
treatises, to images, to sounds. In these scenarios a researcher engages with primary rather than secondary sources; getting to grips with the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir or Hannah Arendt in their own words, or investigating silent movies, is a different prospect from relying entirely on what others have to say.
¹

Whilst all analyses make recourse to the ‘facts’, the strength of any analysis lies in its ability to combine (counter-)arguments, (counter-)evidence, and a persuasive narrative. For instance:

• In political decisionmaking, how a crisis situation is analysed and recommendations to proceed with any given action (or not proceed as the case may be) has consequences; for example, when countries decide to go to war or not.
  
• Legislative reforms or international agreements can ensue from experts’ analysis of a particular policy issue-area such as that of the International Committee on Climate Change. Academic and other sorts of practitioner expertise have their part to play in the debates that follow.
  
• Conflicting analyses can play a major role in policy-making outcomes, or the consequences of public inquiries on controversial issues. Take for instance debates about how best to analyse and then reform social services for at-risk children or victims of domestic violence in the aftermath of high-profile deaths, diverging analyses of what went wrong and who is to blame in the wake of financial crises (for example, the global financial crisis of 2008), or acrimony over a religious leader’s interpretation of a contentious publication or issue.
  ²
  

The question of what the purpose of analysis is in any particular research undertaking, let alone which – or whose – analysis counts in light of conflicting evidence or contentiousness over procedure, are questions that tend to go begging when students are working in mixed/hybrid or composite disciplinary settings. As Carol Smart notes, these days the work being done in many parts of academe is

For those projects working with worldviews that would dispute this view (see Chapter
3
) the point still remains that analysis, even as the sum total of variable sorts of capturing, condensing, and representing said ‘reality’, is when the researcher
actively
provides some sense of coherence,
makes informed
and perhaps even inspired
decisions
about the value of any findings (including the means by which they were arrived at), and
sets up parameters
for presenting the material to be included, or excluded, either beforehand or in the course of writing. This is why analysis is more than listing, more than description, more than assertion, more than a compilation of everything a researcher has done, everything we have found out. Analysis entails:

• Making a commitment
  , either taking a conscious stance before the analysis (deduction), developing one as you go along (induction), a mixture of the two
  (‘grounded’ analysis/ theorizing), within or despite respective ‘disciplinary constraints’ (Smart 2010: 7).
  
• The act of
  thinking
  , as a cognitive and intellectual process.
  
• It is also a lot about
  doing
  , organizational and literary processes such as writing, tabulating, calculating, coding, sorting, rewriting, deleting, reordering, and representing in graphic forms. All these are elements in any said analysis. Only the most diehard advocate of the power of numbers or direct observations as knowledge in their own right would suggest that there are data requiring no analysis.
  

What are the trade-offs, then? Researchers, students in particular, at this stage are often confronted with the realization, sometimes too late, that not matter how much material we have, or have not managed to gather, as ‘evidence’ it needs help in ‘speaking for itself’. This boils down to three sorts of trade-offs:

1. However we enter the research domain of our choice, gather or engage with the ‘raw’ material relevant to our inquiry, we need to render that material in some processed way: to represent it.
   
2. And that means, effectively, changing the form, if not the substance of that data on the way; statistical analysis of large ‘n’ surveys are but the first base of this phase for quantitative models; the researcher still needs to engage with these results by making an interpretative intervention.
   
3. Likewise for those performing any sort of textual analysis: a picture may ‘tell a thousand words’, but whose words, and what is there to tell?
   

Before getting into particulars, the next section deals with approaches in which the ‘rules and procedures’ reside in modes of analysis rather than modes of gathering data.
³

In western academe, the large majority of material that is gathered, analysed and presented as scholarly knowledge in the humanities and social sciences takes the form of written texts, as already noted in
Chapter 4
. Even as industrialized societies have acquired significant dimensions of visual material with the advent of television, film, and increasingly image-laden computer interfaces in the age of the internet, written documents still provide researchers with primary data. Historians deal with archival documents, those looking to investigate policy study written communiqués, White Papers, and legislation as legal scholars dissect legal statutes. Meanwhile, cultural and social anthropologists, media and communications scholars, sociologists, and political scientists have been taking an interest in the ‘visual cultures’ that constitute how individuals and communities live and make sense of their world.

For these reasons alone, the term ‘text’ now denotes more than the written word; a photographic image, film, television programme, advertisement, or piece of music can also be regarded as a text. Their multiples also, such as an advertising campaign,
musical genre, set of images, novel. That no text emerges from nowhere, out of context, is a basic premise of those forms of analysis focusing on the way texts are produced, who produces them and under what conditions. These demarcations are further complicated when text (literal and otherwise) is accompanied by an interest in attitudes, behaviours, and even outcomes whereby the text/s are treated as causal agents. By the same token, much useful and indeed groundbreaking research has been carried out on texts treated as self-contained data, in which meaning/s are contained, intention and interpretation deducible from this content.

Paths diverge within this larger rubric. On the one hand researchers can treat texts (narrowly and broadly defined) as opaque or transparent. In both instances we see research designs where a body of material (written texts for instance, or advertising images) is treated forensically, being broken down into composite parts, examined, and then reconstituted with an increase in insight or new knowledge emerging. These two forks in the road proceed more or less as follows:

• On the one hand, researchers treat written textual matter as an empirical, contained object comprised of words, phrases, grammar, and syntax. Much can be learnt, according to this approach, by analysing this manifest content in a methodical, consistent, and so comparable way. The cumulative effect of this sort of approach is to
  
  • ascertain measurable indices of meaning-as-content as a baseline as well as an indicator of significance; for example, frequencies of derogatory terms, news coverage, trends, fashionable ideas;
    
  • interpret the implications following from there; for example, the appearance of negative terms frequently paired with a particular social grouping (male youths and anti-social behaviour, homeless people and addiction, the Global South and misery) are used to prove hypotheses about
    media framing
    , social prejudices, the power of newsroom editors, and such like.
    
• On the other hand, the opacity of the material requires or is taken both as a given and as a riddle. This paradoxical approach means that there are various sorts of interpretative intervention possible, if not preferable. Three broad lines are:
  
  • by following the line of thought of the analyst who has acquired an intimate understanding of the text in its own right and context (perhaps even translating or transcribing parts of the text) as a
    hermeneutic
    , namely as one element in a larger set of texts and historical trajectory;
    
  • by applying strict, or more open-ended forms of interpretative methods, for example,
    semiotics, conversational analysis
    , and other sorts of linguistic approaches to the way languages function by which these architectures – grammar, syntax, and other technicalities – frame how the analyst approaches the selected material including the rules by which they dissect it, from political speeches, to press releases, to literature;
    
  • by doing a bit of both in order to underscore the way that written, visual, or mixed material are
    social texts
    ; there is more than one interpretation, reception, and meaning or significance contained or striven for; for example, advertising exploits these ‘gaps’ and ‘double meanings’ in visual and literary ways, as do painters, poets and novelists.
    

So where exactly does the divide, if indeed there is but a single one, lie? The main line in the sand for our purposes is, I would argue, between approaches that see

• the whole as a sum of its parts; and
  
• those that regard the whole as greater than the sum of its parts.
  

It sounds like a riddle but this distinction has been a fundamental source of friction, both productive and corrosive, in a number of classic and ongoing debates across the arts and humanities, and their counterparts in the social sciences.

In the spirit of pragmatism, the modus operandi here, I will deal with these two pathways and their respective twists and turns in turn, bearing in mind that, as always, these overviews focus on operating principles, practicalities, and wider methodological implications that can be executed as both multi-directional and one-way streets. Moreover, this is a terrain in which terms of reference are often particularly fudged or have different applications; where intellectual fashions come and go. It is also where the polemics of philosophical and interdisciplinary
methodological
grandstanding can hinder creative research, research into not just what people (and now their virtual personae) do or think but also what these activities and ideas produce – as cultural practices, art, media rituals, social institutions, power hierarchies, political regimes, economic exchange, bodies and even the human psyche.