The changing image of public transportation

Since you wish to pursue your graduate studies, what course will you enroll?

Geographic map of the study area

Barkin et al. (in Ryan and Bernard, 2003) interviewed clinicians, community leaders, and parents about what physicians could and did do to prevent violence among youth. These were long, complex interviews, so Barkin et al. broke the coding process into two steps. They started with three major themes that they developed from theory. The principle investigator went through the transcripts and cut out all the quotes that pertained to each of the major themes. Then four other coders independently sorted the quotes from each major theme into piles. Then, the pile sort data were analyzed with multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis to identify subthemes shared across coders.

Where people enter and exit; how long they stay; who they are (ethnicity, age, gender); whether they are alone or accompanied; number of people

“Can you describe how you first became aware of your sickness?”

The object is to look for metaphors in rhetoric and deduce the schemas, or underlying principles, that might produce patterns in those metaphors.

In a study of birth planning in China, Greenhalgh (in Ryan and Bernard, 2003) surveyed 1,011 ever-married women, gathered social and economic histories from 150 families. She conducted in-depth interviews with present and formal officials (known as cadres), and collected documentary evidence from local newspapers, journals and other sources. Greenhalgh notes that "Because I was largely constrained from asking direct questions about resistance, the informal record of field notes, interview transcripts, and questionnaire data contains few overt challenges to state policy." Greenhalgh concludes, however, that their conversations with the researchers, both peasants and cadres made strategic use of silence to protest aspects of the policy they did not like. Cadres, for example were loathe to comment on birth-planning campaigns; peasant women were reluctant to talk about sterilization. These silences form one part of the unofficial record of birth planning in the villages. More explicit protests were registered in informal conversations. From these interactions emerged a sense of profound distress of villagers forced to choose between a resistance that was politically risky and a compliance that violated the norms of Chinese culture and of practical reason.

Describe your relationship with your colleagues.