Assignment Question
Create a detailed “findings” section that documents at least two of the domain worksheets you produced for the Data Analysis. Finally, you will write a “discussion” section that summarizes your findings and establishes their significance. There is no word or page requirement for this assignment. I would just like you to be as thorough as possible and include as much detail as you can. Implementing word or page requirements doesn’t work well with this assignment because much of that will depend on the quotes that are shared, which are going to vary widely.
Following are directions for how to complete each requirement: Data Sources For this requirement, you need to briefly describe the data sources that you used. It would probably be easiest to create a table with the required information but you can format it however you want. For the interview transcriptions you used, please use the pseudonym assigned to the interviewee and include any of the relevant demographic characteristics that you draw on in your findings and discussion. For example, you should try to include things like social class, gender, and age if you use that information to frame your findings. Include the same information for all of the interviewees, regardless of whether or not you specifically use that information to describe them. For example, even if you only reference the ages of four of the interviewees in your findings, please include the ages of all of the interviewees that are included in your analysis overall. Findings For the findings section, you will need to summarize what you learned during the Data Analysis process. You should use the domain and theme worksheets you produced as the basis for this summary. I would like you to summarize your two most important/significant findings. There are different ways you can organize this section, but the most direct approach is to summarize one domain and theme worksheet as one finding. If you use this approach, you would structure each finding summary in the following way: Introduce the finding. Explain it generally, being sure to establish why it’s important and providing any necessary context your reader will need to understand it. Explain how you know. This is where the domain worksheets become important. You want to share specifics from your data analysis to support your claims about the finding and show why it matters. This is where you will share the quotes you selected and it can also be helpful to include counts and proportions. You might, for instance, say “in 6 of the 10 interviews I analyzed, the respondents indicated that…”.
You should try and provide as much support as possible! I won’t penalize you for using too many quotes. Make sure that you provide context for quotes and summarize them. You don’t want to “dump” a bunch of quotes into a paragraph without establishing context for them. You should always provide any relevant information about a person’s class position, gender, race, age, and so on that is necessary for framing their experience. Summarize the finding. Explain its significance and explain what you think your reader should conclude from the data that you presented. You are not required to use this structure and I would like you to use a format that fits with the way you organized your data analysis. Sometimes, for example, it makes more sense to combine multiple domain worksheets to summarize a single finding. Discussion For the discussion section, I’d like you to write at least one paragraph for each of the following requirements: A summary of your findings overall. Summarize each finding and then reflect on how the findings are connected and what they tell us about people’s college experiences overall. Be sure to establish the sociological significance by establishing connections to things like race, class, gender, and so on. Implications of your research. Your findings and summary explained what you learned from the data (from our sample of people) and for this requirement, you want to expand the scope of your analysis and think about what this means overall. You don’t want to make sweeping generalizations because your analysis is only based on a convenience sample of 10 interviews but think about whether there’s evidence of significant changes, what this might mean for people, and whether there are any issues that might need to be addressed via policy. Notes review the following carefully: When you cite your sources and share quotes, never use the source numbers that you assigned. Only use the interviewees’ pseudonyms. Source numbers are meaningless to anyone but you. You shouldn’t include page numbers either because quotes from the sources aren’t anything that your reader would normally look up (I might do that, but I’m also not a “normal” reader of your work). Please “clean up” the quotes that you share. This doesn’t mean that you should edit the grammar or change words for clarity (it would be unethical to do that), only that you should trim quotes so only stuff that is relevant is included. It is fine to trim words from anywhere (beginning, middle, or end) of a quote. If you trim from the middle of a quote, please include ellipses in brackets (like this: […]) to indicate that trimmed words from the middle of a quote. You don’t need to use ellipses if you trim from the beginning or end of a quote. You should generally only trim longer phrases. For instance, if someone said: “You know, I used to get really frustrated… I guess I talked about this earlier, but… you know, having to always ask customers to put on their masks is annoying but now, it’s just like… I’m used to it”, you might edit it in this way: “I used to get really frustrated […] having to always ask customers to put on their masks but now, it’s just like… I’m used to it.” The information that was removed didn’t add any necessary context, nor was it necessary to include it to demonstrate how the interviewee communicated. You do not want to go through the quote and edit out all instances of people doing things like using filler words or even stumbling over words. That sort of thing can be important! It’s perfectly acceptable to paraphrase things people said. You generally want to let the interviewees or observers speak for themselves by sharing the exact language they used but there are cases where people will not have communicated something in a way that is easy to quote and quoting a lot can get excessive. You want the quotes you share to be things that are impactful, so don’t feel like you should just be stringing quotes together.
