Data analysis – identifying themes

7 40 minute interviews generates quite a lot of material, doesn’t it?

Having done a rough transcription of each my next job has been to pick out the key themes that I can base my discussion around, all linked back to the research questions. Partly due to the questions and the content of the interviews I’ve broken these into the following sections:

Defining storytelling – I needed to establish what people thought they were talking about when they talked about storytelling.

Benefits of a storytelling approach (both to organisations and individuals) – what would drive an organisation to use digital storytelling and other narrative approaches?

Disbenefits and risks of using storytelling – what hurdles are likely to appear

Developing skills – what have people already done, what skills do they think need developing and what is the best way of helping them to develop the skills

Organisational perspectives – I need to define this better but I’ve used this category to look at what the impacts of a storytelling approach might be on an organisation and its stakeholders and what the main enablers are.

So, without going into too much detail, here are the emerging themes under each section with a bit of explanation…

Defining storytelling

Structure and content

Building blocks – narrative, character, plot, 
Clear underlying “message”

Nature of stories

Personal in natureMaking something memorable
Making connections with other topics

Impacts on audiences

Attention
Creating an impact
Making connections

Benefits

Supporting existing functions

Marketing
Demonstrating impact, communicating benefits
Synthesis

New approaches to communicating

Adding richness
Capturing what’s usually lost

Developing identities

Exposing our unique selling points
Understanding ourselves better
Reflecting on self and practice

Disbenefits and risks

Vulnerability

Reputation
High stakes strategy, a gamble

Resources

Time
Technologies
Skills 

Integrity and Accuracy

Personal/professional boundaries
Emotional manipulation
More than just anecdotes
Under/overrepresnetation of certain voices and viewpoints
Quality control

Development and change

Environment

Physical
Emotional

Skills and personal styles

Professional backgrounds
Levels of comfort
Congruence with styles

Approaches to learning

Peer support and feedback
Opportunities to practice
Training

Organisational perspectives

Culture

Openness and Transparency
Creativity
management expectations

Compatability

Roles
Context of other tasks
Context of other communication channels (web, blog etc)

Changing environments

Increased emphasis on showing ROI, benefits and impacts

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Reflection

Looking at that list now I can already see some overlaps between the main topic headings and some of the themes within them so I’ll need to resolve some of those. The main offender is the definitions topic.

Also, the wording of some of the themes isn’t quite right, not accurately reflecting what’s whithin them. “Compatability” in particular needs looking at.