Inquiry #6
What Do I Do With All This Data?
To keep your analysis coherent, it's helpful to keep theory and methods tightly linked, by thinking with a set of guiding concepts that integrate with methods throughout the study. In nexus theory, a set of concepts is provided through the three flows that make up a mediated action: interaction orders (IO), historical bodies (HB), and discourses in place (DP). In any mediated action, a person is simultaneously interacting with others (IO) --talking, having coffee, playing, working--in routine embodied practices (HB) in the expected ways of using tools and producing artifacts (DP).
Using Three Flows as Filters
Thinking with each flow can guide early stages of your inquiry and help you progressively narrow your focus as you search for sites of engagement. I’ve incorporated the three flows into the Scollons’ (2004) nexus filtering steps to illustrate how this process organizes and screens initial data during the search for a research site and then focuses inquiry during early visits as you engage the nexus at the selected site.
1. The first filter gives you a sense of what matters here as you learn about core issues from participants (IO) and seek to understand how their issues are reflected in the material environment (DP) and routine practices (HB).
2. The next three filters help you focus systematically on each flow (DP, IO, or HB) as you collect initial data and more of the nexus becomes apparent.
3. The filters funnel data to moments for micro-/macro-analysis of an action in the convergence of these flows so that you can explore its impact and potential for changing nexus.
4. Finally, the last steps are to think practically and imaginatively to improvise and reassemble the typical ways of doing things by altering this small action as a means to help participants reshape the nexus.
These filters can organize your research chronologically as well as analytically and help you to:
identify a site of engagement and what people are hoping to do in this place
DP: locate valued materials in frequent use to decide where to place the video cameras
IO: follow who is usually with whom in social groups
HB: track the most frequent practices that people in this place value
This filtering leads to dense spots in the nexus where close analysis of mediated actions—taping a piece of paper, tapping on a screen—can reveal which of many possible interpretations of this small action are being activated here as well as why and how that action the matters to the people here. Once an action is identified, analysis continues, moving recursively across micro- and macro-analyses, to unpack and situate actions in immediate contexts in their far-reaching histories and trajectories.
In this way, the overall filtering process sifts through a large amount of messy data to find a focus, but with a fluid design that cycles over and over, in and out and back again. Paradoxically, it widens the lens while narrowing the search, following histories and expectations in global circulations of literacy practices and artifacts at every step, putting the research in constant motion, moving back and forth across time and space.