An investigation into the phenomena and practices of spiritual ...

stages of analysis can in fact be accommodated within the three stages used in the NVivosoftware package (c.f. Brewer 2000: 42). Stage One selects utterances in the data. NVivoallocates the name of attributes or nodes where a term is selected and NVivo identifies thenumber of times this word or group of words appear in the data (interviews, observations,notes). Stage Two develops the attributes according to the evidence in the data or thecontext in which they are used in the data. The third stage examines the interconnectionbetween the attributes and the literature. Stage Four subjected the observations generatedfrom the previous stages to further scrutiny and Stage Five, the final stage, selects patternsand themes as they appear in several interviews and subjects them to another level ofanalysis. The coding and analysis process removes the researcher from auto-ethnographicmethodology, although the critical reflective approach as an academic convention is usedto develop the end product of the thesis.In the analysis of findings using McCracn‟s (1988) model, the investigator is aninstrument of investigation. He is the deliberately dispassionate operator of a piece ofcalibrated methodological machinery and finally takes a back stage in the culture inquestion. The investigator allows the audience to take a glimpse of assumptions andcategories that are otherwise hidden from view. The categories tells us what people thinkand do, not how many of them think and do. In this research the investigator makesobservations then make a second and third level observation by interpreting the data fromthe initial interviews and observations and these are presented at different levels ofanalysis. Extracting important elements of the data that relates to healing activitiesespecially in the church services of COGIC was particularly difficult. Returning to thewritings of Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) and McCracken (1988) illuminated the91