Qualitative Analysis:

Introduction

You’ll try to find an answer to a question you have by using empirical data (the maps) to generate an answer. With that in mind, you’ll follow a topic through several chunks of data, mark key terms or items that appear, aggregate the trends and themes, and find an answer.

You should have an informed underpinning: a research question is only interesting insofar as it’s trying to uncover something new, or at least, trying to fill in a gap of a series of larger questions. Build context—it’ll give you a ground against which to draw out your figures, and a means of comparing, contrasting, and/or correlating your results.  Where to find context: use the attached file for a larger context on maps, and how maps tend to reflect worldview.

Your research question is largely up to you, as long as you’re investigating the map data (attached file) from across the classes. The kinds of research you’ll need to find will depend a little on the research question you choose. Perhaps you just want to look at the data about a specific country (do you want to know how people have represented your home country, or a country you have visited?). Perhaps you want to look at the more creative maps—the people whose maps may not even look like maps—and figure out if there are trends in their thinking. Perhaps you want to focus in on a couple of the questions sets, and see if the data generated matches up, or if people are changing their minds (or even contradicting themselves).

As you sift through the data trying to find that underlying answer to your question, depending on the nature of it, you may also want to think about behavior and motivation. What drives a person or group to think or behave in a specific way? Power? History? Geography? Language? Cultural identity? It could be any number of things, but it could be useful for you to build on that part of the context as well.

Finally, you’ll want to consider just how best to show your data so that it’s easier for you to describe it. Some of you might use word clouds, others might try out graphs, others might decide to use pictures or designs, and yet others might use list tables. You’ve got a lot of options. But the data can help you make an impact when it’s visual as well as written. It can give you a means of talking about a lot of scattered information in a compact way; it can also give your brain a means of seeing trends, even when you think there may be nothing there.

Format:

Introduction—introduce your topic, its historical situation, your research question, and why we should think it’s important.

Literature Review—an explanation of your sources, what they are, what they provide, and why they’re important. Another way to think about this is that your literature review explains the intellectual conversation you’re entering into.

Methodology—a recitation of the steps you took—all of them, in order—to find out what’s happening (includes database searching, breakdown and restructuring of data, visual choices your made in your presentation of the data, etc.). You want this, ideally, to be specific enough that a reader could recreate your study and come up with a similar set of results.

Results—a description of what you found, and only what you found, with your visualizations of that data as you notice trends and correlations. This doesn’t include interpretations of that data. Just show what you found, and show the variety of ways you looked at that data.

Discussion—what those results actually mean, given your interpretation of them; what the data you gathered suggests about the processes at work, and how the human beings involved with them work.

Conclusion—what your conclusions suggest in the bigger picture of cross-cultural relations beyond your study. Where might someone look for more information, given what you’ve found? How might they reframe the study to get better results? What follow up study would be useful?

Note—in your bibliography (you need a minimum of 2 articles to ground what you’re doing) and within your project, use MLA style documentation.

A Brainstorming Workshop

1) What questions do you have about the attitudes cross-cultural groups have and develop about each other? What questions do you have about their perception of the world around them and their relationship with it? What are some things you’d like to know?

2) Can you think of an example of something from one of the maps or the descriptions folks provided that seems a little like the question you want to know more about?

3) Given your example, what part(s) of it intrigue you? (i.e. Are you interested in the visual depictions? The design choices? The language the person used to describe his or her tactics/strategy?) Why does that interest you?

4) What kinds of information do you need to find some potential answers to your questions? Do your questions require data coming from a larger number of people? A smaller sample? Do you need to ask some follow-up questions of people?

5) What background information do you think might be useful to help you ground your study? (If you’re interested in the subject matter people tackle in their maps, perhaps you’d want to see some solid data on the dominant interests students from a variety of places have. If you’re interested in how various students portray a specific part of the world, then perhaps you should find some information about how cultural attitudes are shaped—or what they are.)

Category: Essays