Investigation - Starting to analyse your data

Afternoon all.

Today you need to start working on your analysis, and also you need to keep chipping away at your intros and your methodologies. Additionally if you have not yet collected your data, this now needs to be done as a matter of urgency.

Remember that this is an investigation and not an essay so when you hand in your first draft, the analysis needs to be divided into subheadings that will help you explore your hypothesis. This means that you need to give an overview of the data in each section of the analysis (under each subheading) and not explore each piece of data separately.

To structure your analysis section you need to:

1. Choose sub-headings
2. Present quantified data in the form of tables/charts
3. Explore those findings using PEE, context, theory and relate it all back to your hypothesis.

Click here to see an example of how your analysis should be presented.


Choosing subheadings:

• Consider how you are testing your hypothesis e.g. if you are looking at the use of CDS, your subheadings might be 'interrogatives', 'child-led discourse', and 'simplification and diminutives' (notice that these are features of CDS across a range of frameworks that will be significant in the data that will allow you to explore the uses of CDS in the transcripts in a structured, comparative way)

• They don't necessarily need to be techniques, they could be key questions i.e. 'In which ways is dominance established by the dominant participant?' (Notice that this question allows the exploration of not only who may be the dominant participant in each of the transcripts but how they achieve this and could call for more subheadings under this key question)

• The quantifying you have done should lead you to choose these subheadings thoughtfully because it should point you to the significant or puzzling findings that need exploration with PEE

Using Tables/Charts:

• Tables and charts are an important part of your analysis - they help provide evidence of all the thinking you have been doing in order to test your hypothesis and are the basis for your findings

• They should represent the most interesting of your quantified data and should help you to explain why you have chosen to focus of particular areas of the data e.g. if you are looking at gendered language in written texts, you might have a table of which lexical fields dominate and then choose to explore the top two with PEE analysis

• They should be introduced at the start of of the section in a clear and useful way that establishes why they are interesting/useful and an overview of what they show

• They should be positioned where they will be useful to the reader of your investigation and referred to in the analysis, not just for show

 PEE

• Because of word limit, you need to be highly selective about what you explore: pick significant or puzzling findings and look at quotes in context (context is AO3 and worth 20 marks - for tentatively exploring how meanings and representations are affected by social and cultural issues etc.), applying all relevant theories (AO2 - 15 marks) and exploring techniques using terminology, clearly guiding the reader (AO1 - 15 marks)

• Always relate your explorations back to your hypothesis - remember, that's what the investigation is about - how far if your hypothesis supported/contradicted (not proven/disproven because it's such a small investigation) by the data you have collected?

You may go over the word count at the drafting stage but it is better to have more that you can select the best bits from to raise the consistence of the quality of the overall piece. You might end up leaving out a whole sub-heading in order to go into more depth on the others.