📃 14. Presenting Primary Research

Are You Where You Should Be?

This is Module 14: Presenting Primary Research, which should be completed between 4/26 - 5/2. If you haven’t completed everything in Module 13, go back and finish all outstanding tasks now. Don’t forget to click on and review each resource in this guide.

Goals and Checklist

• Understand the difference between narrativizing and interpreting primary research data and presenting it verbatim
• Learn how to synthesize primary research data
• Practice relating primary and secondary research

To help with various access needs, including task identification and separation and advance notice, I’ll include an abbreviated list of tasks at the top of each weekly module. You can check these items off, but your input won’t be saved after you close this window. You remain responsible for checking the Calendar and ensuring that you’re completing everything in a timely fashion.

Important!

Don’t forget to review your Draft 4 (Unit 2 Draft 2) scores along with the updated General Feedback page!

From Codes to Categories

At this stage, you should start figuring out what the connection between your codes is, across all your interviews, and how to best articulate it.

Now that you’ve coded your interviews, you have a mountain of qualitative data to present in your Discussion section in Draft 5 (Unit 3 Draft 1). You do not need to include it all! You should select the most significant codes and associated dialogue for presentation in the Discussion section.

There’s No Shame in Recoding!

Usually, researchers don’t get coding right the first time. Qualitative inquiry demands that we pay close attention to language, images, body language, and then construct meanings around how interviewees represent their experiences to us as researchers. If you find you need to recode your transcripts, you can do so with a more refined perspective using first cycle methods again, then following up with second cycle methods again (Saldana, 2021).

For Draft 5, you’ll be identifying and writing about the 3 most important themes in all your coded interviews. Before drafting, it’s a good idea to free-write or otherwise take notes to prepare yourself to integrate the important ideas from your coded transcripts into formal academic writing.

🛑 Stop: Write!

Try out the below free-writing exercises to begin planning your Discussion sections!

Here are some tips for doing so:

• Review all your coded interviews before engaging in this process.
• Identify the top two most important patterns in each interview transcript, and see how many of them overlap.
• Consider how these patterns help you better understand the 2 themes you identified in your Literature Review section; this might help you figure out which 3 themes to choose.
• Begin with a hypothesis about why these particular themes surfaced in your interviewees’ responses.
• Summarize each interview in 1-2 sentences through paraphrasing, focusing only on what is important to both your research hypotheses and the 3 themes you’ll be working with in the Discussion section.
• What words did you naturally gravitate to in your summaries that might overlap with some of your codes? This might suggest that you subconsciously processed those themes as important to the interview, and possibly to your research hypotheses.
• Prioritize engaging with the actual language used by your interviewees (like the in vivo codes you may have worked with during first cycle coding).
• Don’t just copy and paste quotes, but include them within your own sentences (as the Writer’s Handbook chapter on paraphrasing, quoting, and summarizing demonstrates)
• When you paraphrase or quote, make sure to note who the speaker is, what they were asked (if it’s important to understand their answer), and the context surrounding the portion of dialogue you’re paraphrasing/quoting (i.e., the dialogue that occurred before and after).
• Consider using 1-2 representative quotes in each paragraph, or quotes that represent the gist of the whole interview with one participant.

Optional Vlog Analysis (If You Couldn’t Get 3 Interviews)

If you needed to substitute 1 prerecorded vlog for an interview you weren’t able to secure, make sure that the vlog you choose to analyze is as close to the interview you would have conducted as possible.

Search for sources where the speaker seems to answer the questions you’re posing to your interviewees, and aim for videos that are roughly as long as the duration of the interviews we’ve been conducting.

Writing the Discussion Section

🛑 Stop: Read!

Read Pacheco-Vega’s blog post on How to Write the Discussion Section of an Academic Paper!

Remember, our Discussion section does not look exactly like the sections described in these posts, but they both provide us with important insights into the process of writing this part of the paper.

Pacheco-Vega primarily reminds us that Discussion sections are analytical, not just descriptive, and are specific in how they interpret research findings (in this case, from your interviews/vlog source). The Discussion section is also where researchers begin linking their primary research findings (interview data) with their secondary research findings (literature review), often in an introduction and conclusion paragraph to the section, and sometimes alongside the interpretation of interview data as well.

Finally, a Discussion section is also where you can contextualize any outliers or surprises by explaining how and why your primary research findings might contradict or not exactly align with secondary research — and also explain how the existence of these specific discrepancies could advance our understanding of your research hypotheses.

It is not the Conclusion but the precursor to your Conclusion. So you have another section where you can do some of this work, but bear in mind that the Conclusion section in qualitative research projects is often used to highlight the most important takeaways for the reader and open up new avenues for inquiry.

🛑 Stop: Read!

Read this post on Gradcoach on writing the Results & Findings!

In addition, GradCoach has a blog post on writing the Results & Findings chapter in dissertations, but the information is relevant to undergraduate research, too. The Results section is often similar to and combined with Discussion sections in research papers; you might encounter sections called Results and Discussion, for instance.

Looking Ahead to the Conclusion Section

Over the next couple of weeks, you’ll work on writing your Conclusion section as well, in which you’ll emulate discipline-specific writing moves by examining the conclusions of published peer-reviewed papers in your field (in your own literature review, perhaps!). How short or long are these conclusions? What are common transition phrases and signal words? Do these papers end with summary, gestures at the significance of research, or ideas for future research?

🛑 Stop: Write!

Review some of the papers in your literature review. How do they craft their Discussion sections, if they have one? Try drafting a template Discussion section using one or more of the sentence and paragraph structures you see happening in these papers, leaving bracketed placeholders {Placeholder} in the places where your data will go. With some fine-tuning, you might end up with a workable “shell” where you can later replace any placeholders with your own writing, pertaining to your own research.

Exit Writing

🥳 Congratulations on getting through this chapter! Don’t forget to check the Calendar for the week’s assignments, including your Tue question and Fri answer posts as well as any other assigned writing. Make sure to look ahead to future weeks as well to get a sense of when low- and high-stakes writing for Unit 3 is due.

Reference List for This Week’s Resources