Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

Presenting and writing up
Tim:
story, it is not going to get told, but what kind of safeguards
do you build in?
I suppose in thinking about how you do it, I would
probably hold in my mind a chapter that appeared in
the growing up with parents who have learning difficulties
book [Booth & Booth, 1996], which takes the
form of a conversation between two sisters. Many of
the techniques that we used in constructing that
chapter are techniques that would apply to our work
generally. Everything that is in the chapter was spoken
by the informants—nothing has been added, but the
order of the words isn’t necessarily the same. The
ordering of the sentences isn’t necessarily the same.
There have been cuts made, elisions, and the material
has been very heavily edited into a coherent text that
is true to their story and was validated by the informants,
in that they were presented with the text, and
they okayed it.
Anne Coleman—Five star motels
As part of the process of feeding back findings to the people who
had participated in her study (Coleman, 2001), Anne conducted a
series of research readings of her work. While she did not talk of her
presentation of findings as performance, Anne’s oral presentation of
her work to the homeless people in her study has some parallels
with performance science, albeit in a less formal way.
Research readings for homeless people
Anne:
This was not entirely satisfactory, but it was the best I
could do—I wanted to take the whole of the thesis
back to people and say ‘Is it all put together okay?’
Now obviously I knew that a large number of people
wouldn’t give a damn about the literature review or
what I said in the methodology, so I did some readings
at a drop-in centre [that] I knew a lot of these people
accessed. Again I flagged them with the graphic image
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