Writing up the results chapter

The date of thesis submission is getting closer. Still a few more months left. But I guess getting it all together and getting all the separate bits of work that I have been working with during the last two years will take considerable time. Especially in terms of getting it to flow coherently linking back and forth and also using the same style of writing throughout.

At present I am working on finalising the results chapter, which has taken me the good part of three months. I started off with the idea of having one chapter for the results but as it progressed, both my supervisor and I realised that it will need to be in two chapters as both needed an introduction and a conclusion. Moreover, the first draft of the survey results went on to 60 pages. So I started off the interview results as a new chapter and today I handed in a complete draft of this chapter to my supervisor.

Looking back at the last three months, I should say the writing up of the results has been harder than I ever expected it to be. It wasn’t as hard as the initial few months where I was struggling to give shape to my research topic and putting in the candidacy proposal. That was one stage in this journey which took a lot of reading (in terms of literature) and writing.

The survey results was at some stages exciting as I was finally looking at some trends, confirming things that I have always known and bringing up things that I haven’t expected to emerge. At other points, it was really tedious as I had to methodically analyse the data, prepare tables, write about the figures, present them graphically and then talk to them. Ploughing through the 60-question long survey questionnaire really tested my patience. The analysis was done using SPSS and I used excel to create the graphs as I wasn’t too happy with the graphics of SPSS.

Writing up of the interview results wasn’t any easier or cheerier. Since it was only 6 interviews, we decided that we did not need computer software to code it for me. And it wouldn’t even have been that practical because the interviews were conducted in Dhivehi language and then transcribed word-to-word in Dhivehi. So for it to really work with something like NVivo I would have had to translate very accurately which would take more time than it would to analyse it manually. The fact that two interviews were not recorded (because they did not consent for it) did create a few problems in the writing up as I must have missed some important points in my note taking.

However, it was also not too bad, because otherwise I would have had to spend more time in transcribing than I did. As it was, I spent over a month on transcribing the 4 recorded interviews. The actual interview durations were approximately one hour for each interview.

I started off writing the interviews thematically according to the interview guide. But then later realised that not all interviews went according to the interview guide and also since the four organisations were different, in their information approach and services, there were no real common themes. So I ended up changing the format of the presentation a few times and in the end I have 4 major sections–which also reflects the 4 main questions on the interview guide –with all the other information coded thematically in one large section.

At first I started retrieving relevant sections from all the interviews going back and forth between the six. But this strategy soon proved fatal as I was only confusing myself by going in all directions by working on 7 different word documents at the same time. Alternatively, I tried going by interview at a time and writing it up and then crossing it out on the transcription so that I know I have already talked about it. Then took the next interview transcription and talked through it, putting it together where appropriate with what I have already written. It was tedious but when I was through with the 4 transcriptions and the other 2 interview notes I was happy with the outcome. I guess I could have done save a lot of time if I had actually translated even the transcribed interview to English in at least summary form. I found it was easier to deal with the interview notes, that I made of the unrecorded interviews than it was with the transcribed ones.

Anyway, the draft looks alright. Now I wait for Kerry to read it and advice me on modifications.

The next step in this journey is writing up the discussions which looking at my track history will require at least 1 month of dedicated work to have a rough draft and another half a month to polish it up.