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November 07, 2019

Ph.D Update Of Work Part A: Thesis And Analytical Framework

The Thesis

The thesis chapters are now complete, at least to the point that the foundations, the arguments, the insights, and all points of discussions have been laid out in a logical and progressive way across each chapter. I would not suggest that the thesis is complete as there is a need to edit and rewrite various chapters and chapter sections. The process of editing and rewriting aims to improve explanations of the research design and the recent amendments that have been made to it, as well as to aim to better explain and develop arguments and insights of the data that have been made since amending the research design.

To achieve this current status of the thesis has itself involved numerous rewrites of each chapter, but I am at a point now where I am not expecting a serious rewrite and reconstructions of each chapter. Of course I cannot make this an absolute claim, because what exactly I edit and the extent to which I edit depends on the way I make further sense of the research findings in accordance with the research question and the research objectives. The edits to all the chapters over the past few years, and the edits that are currently continuing, are as a result of my changing understanding and conceptualisations of the data, and of the phenomenon of interest, and of changes to how I explore and investigate the phenomenon of interest. The thesis has been and still is an evolving document that simply cannot be written ‘as is’ in any first setting, because it will go through as many changes as you consider best to reflect your changing understanding and changes of research approach. This continuous change and amendment is, in my experience, an integral part of engaging with qualitative research and writing a qualitative based research. This is because qualitative research is based around the understanding and interpretation of text based data, and our understanding and interpretation of the text changes continuously particularly though arguably this depends on our philosophical positions. Regardless of our Philosophical positions, it is impossible to identify all possible concepts at the initial stages of your research because concepts are interpreted and constructed during your research analysis process. As I have discussed several times throughout this blog, my conceptualisations of the qualitative data have changed numerous times, which impacted research interests and directions, which impacted the characteristics of the data considered most interesting, which impacted how the data were explored.

An interesting area of debate refers to the way that our conceptions of the data are formed, and the way that concepts of the data appear. This, again, depends on the philosophical position of the researcher because a concept can be argued to emerge from the data, be discovered or identified in the data, or be constructed through interpreting the data. Concepts that are constructed through interpretation can arguably be situated in the middle range position of philosophical stances where concepts are a construction through the process of interpretation, but the interpretations are considered reasonable and reliable. This is something that I am currently working on.

Analytical Framework

The analytical framework is complete and whole, and from my current understanding I do not need at this time to engage with any further developmental work. Again same as with the thesis, I cannot claim this as an absolute but I am fairly confident now that the framework is complete. The analytical framework consists of the codes, categorised into different themes, needed to assist with exploring specific social learning processes. Because it is complete, it needs testing, therefore a current task involves testing the coding framework within a different context from which it has been constructed.

I am in the early stages of testing the framework and I am not completely sure how I am to report on this in the findings and discussions chapters at this time. What I am thinking about is to test the framework within the context and to publish a paper on this testing, and to perhaps compare what shall be conceptualised with what had been conceptualised in the original research. This is ongoing work so I shall return to this at a later stage.

In addition to the testing of the framework, philosophical assumptions are also being developed, some of which are also being tested, as well as explanations of the different contexts within which the framework could be used. These assumptions and explanations are likely to be reshaped and altered as I go through the framework testing process, and as I engage with further literature.