So, I had my eyes tested and realised why I’ve not been getting on with my literature review – I can’t see to read the literature! New glasses on order, so I’m making a start on preparing my data for analysis.

You’d think epistolary interviews would be straightforward to input, but there are decisions to be made, even so. Because somewhere on the back burner I have an article about epistolary interviewing, I’m temted to retain a lot of things which are irrelevant to my doctoral research.

Type size, face and colour, how quickly they responded, whether they interspersed their answers amonst my question, whether they started a new email or hit ‘Reply’ to mine. I’ve decided all that is irrelevant at this point, so everything is being styled ‘Normal’. Same font, same font size, same spacing. This gets problematic when they have mixed their question with my answer, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

I’m going to put all this in NVivo eventually, so I want it as NVivo friendly as possible, which means thinking about the styling. I’ve used four heading levels to style the copy. That means I can pick out their name, their group, whether they are student or tutor and which question they are answering. I hope these prove sufficient – it’s going to be so frustrating if I find there were other categories I should have added at this stage.

Oh, and I have to pick everyone a pseudonym. Must remember to make them noticeably different this time. Last time I had Carol and Karen and Caroline and it thoroughly confused me.