My Grounded Theory Data Collection and Analysis

Person 1 –

When launching into the initial coding for Person 1, I thought first about the impressions I got from our interview and from him as a person. He had a bit of an attitude, a little bit of cheekiness, as if he knew he was homeless, but wasn’t going to let that stop him from feeling good about himself. He was eager to show that he asserted agency in his life. Thinking about this beforehand provided me a framework through which to code his interview. It also, however, led me to codes that weren’t as simple, direct, and tied to the action as they should have been. As an example, the initial codes were things like “Asserting agency,” “Asserting uniqueness,” “Asserting personal responsibility,” “Claiming success?,” “Identifying lessons learned,” “Identifying life path since homeless,” or “Recognizing help.” This continued throughout the interview, and it wasn’t until after I’d done another interview this way that I realized what I’d been doing.

This coding, however, did yield some insights. It seemed like the most complex perspectives arose when he was trying to negotiate his relationship to authority and police. It seemed like he was trying to reconcile his own sense of agency – I did this, and I did this, and I can do this – with the relationship he has with authority, an authority that usually doesn’t let him do what he wants to do. This, coupled with some comments Person 1 made during the interview about how his abilities had been dismissed by others many times in his life, but that he’d always pulled through, led me to think about how Person 1, other homeless people, and all of us relate to the society around us in terms of expectations and achievement. Whose standards of achievement do we live up to? How do we validate the knowledge of our own worth when others refuse to acknowledge it?

Person 2 –

For Person 2, using the same coding approach as for Person 1, I came into coding thinking about what I knew about this person’s situation. I talked to them in a Mission downtown, just down the street from the Bissell Centre. I had already interviewed one person there that day, and I think the people who were preparing lunches for the upcoming meal were getting a bit tired of having the conversation there. During his interview they were preparing bagged lunches, and piling them in big boxes, and making a lot of noise doing it. It didn’t seem to bother him. He had a small dog with him, and the contact who introduced us brought a bowl of water for the dog. In contrast to Person 1, Person 2 did not display an attitude.

What struck me again was the person’s relationship to society and society’s norms. In this case, because Person 2 was closer to my age, my own biases brought Person 2’s relationship to societal norms to the forefront. Person 2 was very matter of fact when relating his narrative, and experiences like serving jail time, doing hard drugs, living with a prostitute, and living in a tent were all narrated in a monotone alongside stories of working and growing up in a small Alberta town. I had trouble accepting this equivalency between experiences. Due to my own bias, I expected that the experiences frowned up by society would be related in a different tone, one more cognizant that what he was doing wasn’t right, especially since we were close to the same age, and especially since we had some shared experiences like growing up in Alberta and working in the oil field.

This bias may or may not have contributed to coding biases. I’ll be looking at that more in the next phase.

Person 3 –

For Person 3, I hadn’t quite got back around to realizing that I was coding at perhaps too abstract a level. I started this initial coding with thoughts from Charmaz (2014) where she discusses how we should approach analysis of not only the interview, but of every facet of information we have at our disposal about the individual or situation. Charmaz advises that,

“This analysis of ‘what is happening’ extends to the setting, in their lives, in the text…try to ‘understand our participants’ standpoints and situations, as well as their actions” (114).

In the case of Person 3, she had been a refugee for many years, and had just managed, through the help of a case worker in Edmonton, to find a place to stay and a job. Although she wasn’t yet through the refugee system, she was working and being valued and had a place of her own to live for the first time in many years. So she was grateful, and apprehensive, and not sure how the system worked, so her interview was coloured by that sense of insecurity, and the need to convince people that she had had a difficult life, that her life would be in danger if she was deported, and that she deserved compassion.

There were a few times during the interview when she said, “there’s so many things…”, as if words or stories couldn’t faithfully tell of everything she’d been through. It makes me wonder at her frame of mind and frame of reference. Perhaps because she had always been vulnerable and alone, did she grow up thinking she had no right to happiness, no intrinsic ability to achieve happiness, or to work toward it?

There were also times during her interview when she was emotional, times when expressing her joy at being in a home of her own, times when she was talking about how scary it was in different parts of her life, times when she cried, and when the translator cried as well.

In her life, in her frame of reference, all these things were bigger than her, and she was small and vulnerable. I wasn’t sure, however, how much of that was determined by the power imbalance between her and me as the interviewer. If she had been describing the same information to someone else, a friend, or someone she knew well and trusted, would it be presented in the same way? I’m not engaging with bias in this question. I’m just questioning if her narration to me was based on her status as a refugee claimant, as someone who had to convince others of her dire situation. Was she building a story and a case for herself, paralleling her refugee claim?

Person 4 –

Reviewing the material in Charmaz, (111), where she talks about the initial coding she did on her interview with the woman who lost her voice due to cancer, I noticed that the codes she used were very much tied directly to what the woman was saying. In my own case with coding, I found that I had almost automatically began to seek out categories of responses and to generalize and get abstract with the coding partway through each interview as soon as I began to see (or think I saw) patterns.

For Person 4’s interview, I was determined to stick with Charmaz’s instructions from the textbook (111): “Note that the codes stick closely to the data, show actions, and indicate the progression of events from Teresa’s point of view” (111). I also noted that I began coding at the beginning of each interview. In keeping with an earlier observation, that the interviewees began each interview with material that they had already rehearsed, because they had to tell their story so many times as a person seeking social services, it struck me that their early interview segments would then almost naturally be more abstract and lending themselves to categories. As they told and retold their stories, they would naturally begin to codify their responses, smooth out the parts that don’t fit, emphasize the ones that work within their self-narrative, and search intuitively for the reasons and rationales behind their actions. Person 1 did this by claiming that he’d always been a troublemaker, Person 2 by attributing his homelessness to his drug use, Person 3 by emphasizing her vulnerability and how scared she’s been.

For Person 4 I remembered the advice of the course professor, who suggested originally that I look through the interviews to see which sections might yield the greatest insights. Following on that, I started initial coding for Person 4 on the second half of the interview.

I found this type of initial coding much faster and easier in a sense, because I wasn’t struggling to come up with patterns or abstractions – I was focusing only on the text.

Person 5 –

In this case I was thinking about the process of initial coding, and how the previous initial coding went well, but how I wasn’t sure how it would turn into focused codes and then categories and concepts related to my research question. It made me realize the limitations of coming up with a research question after the initial interviews had been done.

The initial interviews were done for a verbatim theatre project. I wasn’t asking questions related to the research question, which was, “What common concepts or rationales do people experiencing homelessness use to explain their own histories as homeless individuals and/or the societal structures that they feel constrain their abilities to move out of homelessness?” Instead, I conducted the interviews to elicit a narrative about their lives that I could use for a theatre script.

Charmaz’s dictum about coding, that we’re looking for ‘what’s happening here?’, was only partially applicable because the interviewees weren’t responding to questions relating to the research question. I didn’t ask about Why? I asked Who, What, When, and Where. As a result, I shouldn’t be expecting the coding to provide the Why of their homelessness. Instead, I’ll be using the information presented around the other W’s as sources to infer a Why, trying to fill in the gaps using intuition.

As part of the initial coding for this interviewee, I was struck by how often they put forward a normative view of ethical or moral behaviour, not a description of how people in her world were acting, but a statement about how they should be acting. I followed this back mentally through the coding and discovered many instances of it.

Person 6 –

For initial coding for Person 6, I was struck by how often the interviewee switched perspectives in the middle of an answer. They would be discussing a bit of their personal history, and in the same sentence switch to an objective third-person description of what homeless people are like in general. There were interesting parallels between Person 6’s perspective switching – between the personal and the universal – and the different perspectives the interviewees had on their own narratives.

I started chewing on this, and through an online reflection response with another student, it emerged that in each of these cases the process of narrating their life stories was the same, but the perspective underlying their stories was different. The category or social process of Narrating Self varied between Asserting Self, Justifying Self, and Obfuscating Self, with of course an admixture of each sub-category in the other ones. If we add into the mix the contextual dynamic that each interviewee was responding to me as an interviewer and in their own ways justifying their lives instead of sharing stories with friends, it seems to emerge that each interviewee had a theory themselves about why they were homeless, and what it would take for them to exit homelessness.