Results Chapter Structure

I am pleased to report that I've worked between 15 and 90 minutes on the TFD each day this week. It's progress. Yesterday wasn't great. I attempted several random queries of the database to see if I could get a good baseline of quotes to use when writing the sections. This didn't really work. It felt like I was pulling back a bow string ready to shoot an arrow right at a target, but I couldn't find the right arrow. It's like shooting blanks and expecting a target to get hit. It was useless. Pointless. Dumb. Horrible. I couldn't sleep last night as a result. That was fun.

Tonight was a different deal: I remembered that I did get quite a bit of writing done on this chapter last summer. Something during that process was the catalyst to put the writing aside for a while and work on recoding the phuquing interviews. So, I thought, why not go back into what I had actually written, refresh my memory of where things stood early in the fall, and then start to fill in the gaps with quotes and such from the data. Brilliant!

I wrote about 36 pages last summer. Thirteen of those comprise the chapter with participant descriptions. The other 23 were actual text for this beast of a results chapter. Wow...23? Didn't realize that. And fortunately, these are brief descriptions of the six major themes I found in the data...

...so I think I have my structure for how I'll finish the writeup. Cool! Light-bulb moment! Each of the six themes is comprised of about 3-4 codes. For now, I have a separate Word document for each code that I've summarized, and now I'm explaining its significance to the study and using quotes to support each idea. I think what I need to do first is to finish writing up the individual codes while adding quotes as evidence. Then, I need to weave together each code per its parent theme. Finally, I'll pull together all of the themes, somehow...hmm...not sure how. But I'll leap that hurdle when I get there.

Now I just need to plug away and write it all out of my head. This is supposed to be the toughest chapter, and I can certainly see why. But I think I've figured out, finally, where the hell I'm going with this. Maybe I'll sleep tonight.