Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

494 Chapter 17
Willms et al. (1990) and Miles and Huberman (1994) suggest starting with
some general themes derived from reading the literature and adding more
themes and subthemes as you go. This is somewhere between inductive and
deductive coding. You have a general idea of what you’re after and you know
what at least some of the big themes are, but you’re still in a discovery mode,
so you let new themes emerge from the texts as you go along.
Look for repetitions. ‘‘Anyone who has listened to long stretches of talk,’’
says Roy D’Andrade, knows how frequently people circle through the same
network of ideas’’ (1991:287). In my study of how ocean scientists interact
with the people in Washington, D.C., who are responsible for ocean policy
(Bernard 1974), I kept hearing the word ‘‘brokers.’’ Scientists and policymakers
alike used this word to describe people whom they trusted to act as gobetweens,
so ‘‘broker’’ became one of the code themes for my work.
Look for unusual terms or common words that are used in unusual ways.
James Spradley (1972) recorded conversations among homeless men (they
were called tramps in those days) at informal gatherings, meals, and card
games. Spradley kept hearing the men talk about ‘‘making a flop,’’ which was
their jargon for finding a place to sleep each night. Spradley went through his
material and isolated everything he could find about flops: ways to make a
flop, kinds of people who bother you when you flop, and so on. Then Spradley
went back to his informants and asked them for more information about each
of these subthemes.
And, said Spradley (1979:199–201), look for evidence of social conflict,
cultural contradictions, informal methods of social control, things that people
do in managing impersonal social relationships, methods by which people
acquire and maintain achieved and ascribed status, and information about how
people solve problems. Each of these arenas is likely to yield major themes in
cultures.
More Techniques for Finding Themes
Other techniques for finding themes include pile sorting, making word
counts, and producing key-word-in-context, or KWIC, tables. To use the pilesorting
method—what Lincoln and Guba (1985:347ff) call cutting and sorting—look
for real quotes from the interviews you do with informants that
represent what you think are important topics in the data. Cut out each quote
(making sure to leave some of the context in which the quote occurs) and paste
it onto a 3 5 index card. On the back of the card, note who said it and
where it appeared in the text. Then, lay out the cards on a big table, sort them
into piles of similar quotes, and name each pile. These are the themes (Ryan
and Bernard 2003:94).