Qualitative_data_analysis

OF MAPS AND MATRICES 205
[In a calmer moment, I convinced (Gauguin) to try filling teeth
outdoors and we worked in a meadow surrounded by greens and golds.
He put caps on a Miss Angela Tonnato and I gave a temporary filling to
Mr Louis Kaufman. There we were, working together in the open air!
Rows of blinding white teeth in the sunlight! Then a wind came up and
blew Mr Kaufman’s toupee into the bushes. He darted for it and knocked
Gauguin’s instruments to the ground. Gauguin blamed me and tried to
strike out but pushed Mr Kaufman by mistake, causing him to sit down
on the high-speed drill. Mr Kaufman rocketed past me on a fly, taking
Miss Tonnato with him. (Letter 5)]
Although Mr Kaufman gets the worst of it, he is far from passive and indeed it his
action in darting for the toupee which leads to catastrophe. Mr Feldman is even less
passive.
[(Gauguin) was in the midst of an extraction when I disturbed him. He
had his knee on Mr Nat Feldman’s chest with the pliers around the man’s
upper right molar. There was the usual struggle and I had the misfortune
to enter and ask Gauguin if he had seen my felt hat. Distracted, Gauguin
lost his grip on the tooth and Feldman took advantage of the lapse to bolt
from the chair and race out of the office.)
Contrast this incident involving Mr Feldman with the cosy intimacy conjured up in
the Claire Memling story or the passivity of Mrs Zardos waiting patiently for her
dentist to return. This variation in the data is suggestive and might encourage us to
look closely at different roles in which Woody Allen casts his male and female
patients.
As well as identifying regularities and variations, our matrices can draw our
attention to singularities in the data. One of these is the Claire Memling story,
where the male-female relationship assumes its own peculiar dynamics. The
associations with entrapment and vulnerability we noted earlier acquire a particular
resonance when Vincent is vibrant with sexual passions. Although the Claire
Memling story is a singular episode, not repeated with other patients, we may see it
as encapsulating some of the themes which animate other parts of the data, and
therefore worthy of particular emphasis.
So far we have used our matrices to complement the analytic work we have
accomplished through categorizing the data. But we can also use a matrix to
comprehend the results of our categorization. We could choose, for example, to
display our databits by case and category. If we did this for our first letter, the result
might look something like Table 13.4.