7.1.1 Sample Size
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50
51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67
68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84
85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101
102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118
119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131
You may be doing an inventory of the differing views of teachers in a rural
primary school, interviewing them about the different ways they have of
maintaining classroom control. Since there are only four teachers in the school,
you plan to describe each of the four grids in order, using the techniques
described in Chapters 5 and 6. So long as you’re systematic about it, signposting
what you’re doing, providing bulleted summaries, and perhaps using
a standard framework within which you can indicate similarities and
differences between the various grids, you’ll be able to report all the
relevant information in a way which is sensible and easily digested by your
readers.
This approach is very straightforward. In each case, you work through the
same set of analysis techniques chosen from Chapters 5 and 6. What you do
with one grid, you do with the others. Then, if it makes sense, you compare the
main points of information from each grid with each other grid. You’ll find
yourself comparing and contrasting, and perhaps drawing inferences from the
interviewee’s individual background and experience, to cast light on the ways
in which they construe similarly, and differently, to the other people in the
sample. Fine!
Suppose, however, that your audit covered all 50 teachers employed in a
comprehensive school. What then? Making sense of more than three or four
grids at a time is rather more complicated. The amount of information you’re
dealing with grows exponentially with each new interviewee (because at some
point you’re probably making comparisons among all the interviewees), and
your reader ends up being unable to see the wood for the trees well before the
total of 50 people has been reached!
It looks as though you’ll need to sacrifice some detail in each of the grids, while
recognising trends that are common to all of them. A content analysis will do
just that, summarising the different meanings in the interviewees’ grids by
categorising them, counting the similarities and differences within each
category.
Section 7.2 provides you with a generic approach to content analysis, which
drops some of the information in all of the grids in the interests of clarity,
while concentrating on the essentials which you wish to communicate as
representative of the sample of interviewees as a whole.
Section 7.3 provides a variant of content analysis suited to samples of around
15 people and over, which makes use of a substantial proportion of the
information present in the whole sample of grids while remaining true to its
individual provenance. A running example is used to illustrate the procedure.
In both situations, your unit of analysis is not the individual grid, but the
individual construct.