Sunday, January 31, 2010

Comparing across sessions

I thought it would be useful to note my thoughts about how the cross-session analysis will unfold before actually starting it.

First I'll look at each of the individual session analyses and compare them horizontally. For example, look at each of the eight shaping forms and look for interesting correlations and differences between the ways shaping happened, look at each of the sensemaking moments for the sessions and compare them, look at the way practitioner focus compares in the grid analyses, etc.

Generally I'm going to be looking for the way the following dimensions compare across the eight sessions:

- intended and 'lived-in' narratives, to give context to the breaches (sensemaking triggers) as well as 'canonicity' of the sessions
- sensemaking triggers (discontinuities, dilemmas, and anomalies that the practitioners respond to)
- shaping (the aesthetics/form of the representations, before and after sensemaking triggers)
- collaboration & practitioner/participant interaction, especially choices the practitioners make that affect the 'interests' of the participants (i.e. ethics)
- types of practitioner focus
- types of improvised practitioner actions
- what is done in the sessions to make the representations 'work' (to make them coherent, engaging, useful etc.)

I may construct some tables showing short summaries of each of the sessions as they fall into these categories.

Hopefully some interesting patterns will emerge. I should be able to come up with some axial coding-type dimensions (e.g. what are the 'more' and 'less' types of values that would emerge when I compare sensemaking triggers, what would 'more' and 'less' types of values be for aesthetic shaping and ethical choice-making, etc.

That may lead to having something interesting to say about this group of sessions as a whole.

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