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
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
Leave a Reply