DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

areas were covered spontaneously as the participants told their stories of crisis.
Therefore interviews were often not structured in the above sequence, but the
interview question schedule was essential nonetheless to check that all areas had been
covered over the course of the interview. Full written transcriptions were made of
each individual interview from the recordings, and were then used as the raw data for
analysis. The first step of analysis was adding annotated notes and comments on
transcripts. General analytical remarks were written on any part of the transcript in an
emergent and spontaneous initial exploration of the meanings in the text, and then the
right hand margin was used to note down emerging themes. This can be viewed in the
extract in Figure 6, taken from Gemma’s transcript.
Figure 6 also shows the use of highlighting on the transcripts; this was used to
visually link text to four a-priori domains of analysis. These were: 1) Background
Information (blue), 2) The Crisis Process (yellow), 3) Development and Effects (pink)
and 4) Self (green). This process of colour-coding helped to create some categorical
order in the early analysis. These domains were changed as the data-collection
process progressed, and were replaced by more grounded, emergent categories in
Studies 2 and 3.
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