Social Construction of Reality - Bad Request

Archival Data Content Analysis
Content analysis of archival data from The School District’s pilot program
evaluation, an evaluation of the English Speaker’s of Other Languages program, was
performed. The content analyzed included field notes from commissioning activities with
district administration, one-on-one interviews and focus groups, stakeholder meeting
agendas, a binder of best ELL practices, drafts of the evolving program logic model, final
logic model, emails from the program manager to program evaluation staff, draft report
of evaluation, and report submitted at final stakeholders’ meeting. A process was used to
identify key topics, as recommend by Merriam (1998). Specifically, the data were
distilled via the process of constructing an interrelationship diagraph. The purpose of the
interrelationship diagraph is to take a “central idea, issue or problem and map out the
logical or sequential links among related items. It is a creative process that shows every
idea can be logically linked with more than one other idea at a time” (Brassard, 1996, p.
41). This process was organized into three steps: identifying and articulating key ideas,
organizing the ideas according to obvious trends, creation of relationship arrows.
All documents were organized according to date of creation and place within the
evaluation timeline. All documents were then read and key topics and relevant
characteristics were highlighted. Identified elements were then transcribed into one-line
statements. Utilizing the computer program Inspiration, each statement was copied and
pasted into a box; this resulted in a representation of what Brassard (1996) deems an
“explosion of ideas” (p. 41).
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