Social and Ethnic Inequalities in the Cypriot Education System by Areti Stylianou David Scott

Author:Areti Stylianou, David Scott [Areti Stylianou, David Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, General, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351397162
Google: CwadDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-11T04:56:13+00:00

Data analysis

Data collection in Kappa and Delta schools (i.e. the in-depth case studies) were conducted in eight full day visits in each school, spanning eight weeks between my first and my last visit. The exact plan of my field work was discussed and agreed with the head teacher. Site visits to Kappa and Delta schools were scheduled between mid-April 2011 and the end of June 2011 (15/4/2011–29/4/2011). Gathering my data between the Easter vacation and the end of the school year gave participants the opportunity to have already established both relationships with and opinions about others. I avoided collecting data at the beginning of the school year and just before celebratory events, e.g. Easter, Christmas. I considered that during these particular times of the year I was going to be an inconvenience in the school and I could not get an overall picture of how the school normally functions. With regards to the interviews of the two remaining case studies (i.e. Zeta and Omega schools) I opted to conduct them soon after the school closed, that is, between mid-June and the beginning of July. At this time teachers would have already started their summer vacations and they would have remembered their recent experiences. I arranged with each individual the time and place we were going to meet. The meeting sites were participants’ houses.

In the process of my research analysis, NViVo has been a helpful tool since it allowed the organisation of the data according to each case study, while it gave me the opportunity to link my data with the literature. To organise the data in NViVo, I had to turn different forms of information (e.g. hand-written information) to the same format and then distinguish the data that belonged to each case study. I read through and familiarised myself with the data in order to find some recurring themes while I also grouped all the relevant data extracts under each theme. The extracts ranged from being a single word to being a small paragraph and they included among others, participants’ actions, opinions, implied meanings or events. Maxwell (2013) calls these categories ‘substantive’ since he suggests that it is an ‘emic’ categorisation pertaining to participants’ own words or beliefs. However, it is up to the researcher to decide in which category to place each extract. I tried to group extracts with a similar conceptual basis in terms of their similarity, resemblance or commonality, which Maxwell (ibid.) calls ‘virtual categories’. Furthermore, categories pertained to the context and the geo-history in which data occurred, e.g. the context of the school. This strategy helped me overcome the de-contexualisation problem into which researchers sometimes fall if they apply only the connecting strategy in their analysis.

Data collected for each case were analysed and presented independently concerning each individual case study before turning to a cross-case comparison. I attempted to see relationships between the codes and build some models, taking into account tools from critical realism, dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of meta-reality, so as to organise my data in a more consistent way.

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