Taking the Case to Court (Blog 3)

Welcome Back!

I am so excited to share the progress I made on my research journey since we last spoke! I have made significant progress, and although I am not quite done, I have some exciting data to share!

What Have I Been Working On?

In short: reading, more reading, and more reading. The amount of text I had to get through was immense, and I have spent the last month engrossed in the various texts. I first finished my initial reading of all the sources, then I determined the codes I would annotate for, and finally I annotated for the codes within the texts. I am now working on my data analysis to determine the statistical significance of my results.

Determining Codes

After I finished my initial readings of all the documents, I compiled my notes to decide on themes that I found to be prevalent. I discussed my ideas with my mentors and confirmed them with other students in order to mitigate bias. Once I decided on the codes, I knew it would be very important to define them clearly in order to further mitigate the subjectivity inherent in this style of research. Here is what I came up with:

Social Equality (for and against): “equivalent treatment of and opportunity for members of different groups within society regardless of individual distinctions of race, ethnicity, gender, age, social class, sexual orientation, or other characteristics or circumstances" (APA Dictionary of Psychology).
Economic Equality (for and against): "people have the same income or total wealth" (Foundation for Economic Education).
Equality Before the Law (for and against): This definition came from Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Because it is significantly longer, I am not going to include the whole thing directly on the blog, but please feel free to view its definition (along with the other ones) here. The biggest aspect of it is "All persons shall be equal before the courts and tribunals."
"Othering": "set of dynamics, processes, and structures that engender marginality and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences based on group identities" (Center for Compassionate Leadership). (This one was mainly used for language that negatively distinguished a certain group of people).

Coding

After all of that buildup, it was time to finally start coding my documents. This process proved to be very tedious, as I had to thoroughly think through and justify everything I chose to (and chose not to) code. Although this style of research is inherently subjective, especially because I was coding for big, thematic ideas as opposed to specific words, I worked hard to mitigate this. In order to do so, I used very clear definitions for each code, and I worked with classmates to review the codes that I made. As I went through the text, when I saw a code I highlighted it with its corresponding color, numbered it, denoted it in my reflection journal with an explanation if necessary, and I ultimately added them to my online data collection chart. Image 1 below shows an annotated page of Brown and Image 2 shows the page from my reflection journal in which I tracked all of my codes. I went through this process with all of my sources! Image 3 shows me coding Brown (II) towards the beginning of the coding process, and Image 4 shows me coding the Communist Manifesto towards the end of my coding process.

Image 1

Coding of Brown

Image 2

Tracking of Brown codes in Reflection Journal

Image 3

Annotating Brown (II)

Image 4

Annotating Communist Manifesto

The Data

Below, you will find the date table that denotes the frequency of the codes within each respective source.

Next Steps

Although I have my data collected (yay), I still have a few significant steps to complete before I part from this research.

First, I will need to run my data analysis (for more detail about this, refer to my previous blogs) in order to evaluate the statistical significance of this data. I have the numbers, but I need the "so what": that is, is there a difference between the data points. I am actively working on data analysis which is why I am unfortunately unable to share more here. Feel free to check this link that leads to the document on which I am conducting my research analysis.

After I complete my data analysis, I will complete my presentation and oral defense. Finally, I will complete my paper. These next steps will help me to contribute to the academic conversation within this area and help address the gap within the field.

Things are getting exciting as we come towards the end; as always, thank you for accompanying me on this research journey!

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