Social Construction of Reality - Bad Request

policy, and The School District’s vision, mission, and goals. Once content analysis was
complete, an affinity diagram was created. Brassard (1996) notes, “this tool gathers large
amounts of language data, organizes it into groupings based on the natural relationships
between each item, and defines groups of items. It is a largely creative process” (p. 17).
Content analysis of archival data from The School District’s program evaluation
pilot was performed, and then it was analyzed utilizing an interrelationship diagraph.
Again, Brassard explains, “this tool takes a central idea, issue, or problem and maps out
the logical or sequential links among related items.” Though it is very much like an
affinity diagram, it is not the same in that “an affinity allows some initial organized
creative patterns to emerge but an interrelationship diagraph lets logical patterns become
apparent” (p. 41).
Open and axial coding was utilized to reduce data gathered from surveys and
interviews. These processes allowed the researcher to first “fracture the data…to identify
some categories, their properties, and dimensional locations” and then put the data “back
together in new ways by making connections between a category and its subcategories”
(Heppner & Heppner, 2004, p. 152). In constructing the electronic survey, the Delphi
technique was utilized to integrate data and ensure all stakeholder ideas were properly
represented. Garavalia and Gredler (2004) note that this “technique permits the collection
of rich evaluation data” (p. 375). The member check strategy was used throughout the
process to provide for internal validity.
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