We completed the first year of Living Multiculture on 1st July, meaning we’re halfway through our project – but all the way through the first phase of our fieldwork. We completed the last of our focus groups last week, and we’re now immersed in the masses of data we’ve collected in the form of individual and group interview transcripts and detailed field notes. Time to get to grips with the data analysis!
The team spent some time thinking carefully about how we are going to manage all of this data using NVivo qualitative data analysis software (with the expert help of Mark Carrigan). Preparing a code book has really helped us to organise our thinking about the questions we are asking of the data and the emerging themes we are already thinking about. The next stage of work will be about meticulously going through our data and organising it into broad themes, while keeping detailed notes about more nuanced themes and ideas that we notice while doing so. Doing this kind of interpretive work as a large team needs clarity and organisation, which we’re trying to build in from the start.
We already have some ideas about themes that are emerging from our early analysis, and these are informing how we are beginning to organise the data. We’re organising our thoughts conceptually (e.g around ‘conviviality’, ‘environment and the non-human’), practically (around ‘methods and methodology’ and ‘policy’), and thematically (around ‘place and belonging’, ‘feelings’). We’ll gather the data that relates to each of these ‘codes’ and more, recognising that they will be cross-cutting and that by organising the data we will develop new ideas about what it is telling us.
We’ll be sharing these ideas and emerging findings in more detail at our interim findings seminar on 27th September at the OU Camden Centre – please let us know if you’d like to attend. This builds on the conference papers we presented at the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference in Los Angeles in April and will incorporate work from some of the new conference papers we are writing – Katy presented some thoughts on methodology derived from working on the project at the Emotional Geographies conference in Groningen at the beginning of July, and Sarah and Hannah will each be presenting papers on behalf of the team, one based on our work in parks, and one based on our work in cafes, at the Royal Geographical Society’s Annual Conference in London in August.
Our interim findings seminar and our ongoing data analysis will prepare us for the final, smaller-scale stage of fieldwork, when we will be interviewing local civic leaders and policy makers in our three locations of Hackney, Milton Keynes and Oadby. We want to be able to reflect on our emerging findings with those local influencers, and discuss how understandings of everyday multiculture are relevant to their work.
For this final stage of the project, we will be recruiting a new Research Associate as Hannah will be moving on to take up a post as Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Warwick. Do look out for the advert on www.jobs.ac.uk if you would like to join the team for this part of our research journey.