View/Open - Scholarly Commons Home

Chapter Three – Research methods and their use - Page 99
The choice and treatment of ‘Sticky Moments’ for synchronic
analysis
I will say something here about what I am doing in the five Chapters Five to Nine, the
synchronic analyses. In these, I am taking a series of five points in time in the life of the
class, rather like a series of cross-sections of the alternative diachronic account which
appears in Chapter Four.
The five moments or episodes were chosen after at least two hearings of the complete
tape-recorded data, that is the recordings of fourteen two-hour classes. In choosing
moments or episodes from the recordings of the semester for analyses in Chapters Five
to Nine, I looked for markers of such moments, for example, parapraxes or mis-
performances, eruptions of emotion or humour, expressions of probable unconscious
conflict, or awkward silences. These moments rapidly stood out for me for a range of
reasons, but key factors were that they could involve a positive presence of phenomena,
as in the episodes in Chapters Five, Six and Seven (Up-Bringing, The Eruption and The
Fish-Hook), or a relative absence of phenomena that might be expected to be present, as
in the episodes in Chapters Eight and Nine (The Scrap and Losing Time).
In each case in the synchronic analyses, in other words, in relation to each Sticky
Moment, I set the moment or episode in the context of the session of the course in
which it occurs, describing what takes place, and then offering analysis and
interpretation of this material. Clearly there will be biases even in my description, let
alone in my analysis and interpretation. In the case of Chapters Five (Up-Bringing) and
Eight (The Scrap), these biases can be examined by comparing my description with the
fairly extensive verbatim transcriptions which are included in each of these chapters.