Qualitative_data_analysis

PRODUCING AN ACCOUNT 247
An analysis is ultimately concerned with human situations and social processes.
Each of these ingredients in story-telling (and no doubt there are others) can be used
to make our analysis more accessible, perhaps as much to ourselves as to an outside
audience. This is not just a matter of making our analysis accessible in the sense of
an ‘easy read’; it is also about engaging the moral attention and interest of the
reader, and hence enhancing the human value and impact of our analysis. It is a way
of returning our analysis to its roots in a world of practical human and social—and
not merely abstract academic—concerns.
Appropriately, enhancing an account through story-telling techniques is more a
question of improving quality than adding quantity. To describe a setting vividly
and convincingly need not take endless pages of detailed description. Consider the
classic beginning of a fairy-tale: ‘Once upon a time’. This short phrase, resonant
with magical and mystical associations of a world long passed, sets the context of the
story in a time ‘other than our own’; as Bettelheim (1991) suggests, it immediately
sets the story in ‘psychic space’ rather than in the real everyday world. To stimulate
sympathy for characters, it is necessary only to recognize them as human beings,
rather than dehumanized ‘actors’ embodying some abstract set of psychological or
social characteristics. In practical terms, we may, for example, use real or fictional
names instead of case numbers. We may write our story in an active rather than
passive mode, with real subjects taking action, not just being acted upon. To create
a concern for outcomes, we need only pay heed to the uncertainties of the story as it
unfolds, and avoid foreclosing through the benefit of hindsight choices and
dilemmas inherent in social action. This may mean, for example, using incidents
and anecdotes to reveal themes, before identifying and commenting upon them,
rather than the reverse.
A good story is like a journey, in which we travel with the characters through the
intricacies of the plot, to arrive at a conclusion. The evolution of the plot is as
integral to the story as the final resolution. Indeed, in many respects it is the journey
that counts, rather than the destination. In this respect, also, we may learn from
story-telling in reporting on our analysis. Analysis is also like a journey, and its
conclusion can be reached and understood only by travelling on it. This does not
mean that we must reconstruct every step of the way. The original journey was, no
doubt, full of the usual blind alleys, switch-backs, short-cuts which proved to be
long cuts, and so on. But having finally discovered the right path to our conclusion,
we need to mark that path for those that we would have follow and arrive at the same
destination.
To trace our journey, or at least the main routes we have followed, and the major
choices we have made, we need to have kept an ‘audit’ of our account. That means
we have to keep track of the decisions we have taken at various points in our
analysis. We have been making such decisions from our initial search for a