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Qualitative_data_analysis

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For example, here are some questions about Victoria Wood’s humour which we<br />

might ask inspired by the comments in Illustration 5.2.<br />

Is it infused with ‘realistic associations’?<br />

Does it affirm women’s experience, rather than denigrate it?<br />

Does it ridicule oppressive contexts and restrictive values?<br />

Do Wood’s characters display insight and integrity, being self-critical<br />

without being self-deprecating?<br />

Does it address itself to women, their values and experiences?<br />

Does it allow women to question self-critically the stereotypes that have<br />

governed their lives?<br />

We can also identify some questions about humour in general rather than women’s<br />

humour in particular. We could frame these in the form of hypotheses (Figure 5.1).<br />

The virtue of expressing questions in this form is that it focuses enquiry on the<br />

nature of the concepts employed and on the character of the relationships between<br />

these concepts. For example, in formulating these hypotheses, should we distinguish<br />

the ‘unexpected’ and the ‘irrational’ from the ‘incongruous’, as Merrill does, or are<br />

these merely variants of the same concept? What does an ‘aesthetic distance between<br />

empathy and judgement’ mean? How would we recognize one if we saw it? By<br />

formulating hypotheses, we force ourselves to clarify our concepts, because we have<br />

to think in terms of how these concepts can be observed or measured.<br />

The same is true of relationships between concepts. Take the hypothesis relating<br />

‘congruity’ and ‘humour’. What is the nature of this relationship? Is ‘incongruity’ a<br />

cause of humour, as I have implied, or merely a condition of it? And if ‘incongruity’<br />

is a cause of humour, does it require as a condition an ‘aesthetic distance between<br />

empathy and judgement?’<br />

One article is hardly an exhaustive review of the literature; but already we have<br />

acquired some sense of what questions we might ask, and what we could look for in<br />

the <strong>data</strong>.<br />

Resources to help find a focus<br />

• Personal experience<br />

• General culture<br />

• Academic literature<br />

FINDING A FOCUS 71<br />

In developing a focus we are less concerned with the detail of individual concepts<br />

and relationships than with the identification of general themes. What are the

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