Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 505
had spent 5 years or more in West Germany and had returned to Greece to
reestablish their lives. We were interested in how these returned migrants felt
about the Greece they returned to, compared with the Germany they left.
Before doing a survey, however, we collected life histories from 15 people,
selected because of their range of experiences. Those 15 returned migrants
were certainly no random sample, but the consistency of their volunteered
observations of differences between the two cultures was striking. Once we
noticed the pattern emerging, we laid out the data in tabular form, as shown
in table 17.5. The survey instrument that we eventually built reflected the concerns
of our informants.
In reporting our findings, Ashton-Vouyoucalos and I referred to the summary
table and illustrated each component with selected quotes from our
informants. The issue of gossip, for example (under ‘‘negative aspects of
Greece’’ in table 17.5), was addressed by Despina, a 28-year-old woman from
Thrace. Despina was happy to be back in Greece, but she said:
Look, here you have a friend you visit. Sooner or later you’ll wear or do something
she doesn’t like. We have this habit of gossiping. She’ll gossip behind your
back. Even if it’s your sister. In Germany, they don’t have that, at least. Not about
what you wear or what you eat. Nothing like that. That’s what I liked.
By the way, the translation of Despina’s comment has been doctored to
make it sound a bit more seamless than it did in the original. I’ve seen thousands
of really interesting quotes in ethnographic reports, and common sense
says that most of them were fixed up a bit. I don’t see anything wrong with
this. In fact, I’m grateful to writers who do it. Unexpurgated speech is terrible
to read. It’s full of false starts, run-ons, fragments, pauses, filler syllables (like
‘‘uh’’ and ‘‘y’know’’), and whole sentences whose sole purpose is to give
speakers a second or two while they think of what to say next. If you don’t
edit that stuff, you’ll bore your readers to death.
There is a case to be made for recording people’s statements verbatim, but
that’s different from reporting those statements. Obviously, if you are doing
linguistic, conversation, or narrative analysis, you need to record and report
verbatim material.
Content Analysis
While grounded theory is concerned with the discovery of hypotheses from
texts and the building of explanatory models from the same or subsequently
collected texts, content analysis is concerned with testing hypotheses from the