The Beast Had to Marry Balinda: Using Story Examples to Explore Socializing Concepts in Ugandan Caregivers’ Oral Stories

studies focused on the learning readiness of young children (ages 5-7) as influenced by the reading habits and library use of their primary caregivers—most often their mothers and grandmothers (although there were two fathers in the study who were the primary caregivers). The project included more than 50 hours spent interviewing 51 caregivers about their reading, storytelling, and literary practices, as well as their home lives, health, and socioeconomic status. As part of the interview process, we asked caregivers to talk about the stories told to their children who were participating in the study. These stories were actually examples of told stories; the caregivers were not observed telling the stories to their children in a natural setting. The caregivers were thus engaged in telling us about their telling of these stories by answering other related questions while also providing examples of the stories themselves. Our study employs a grounded theory approach in order to analyze the data extracted from these interviews. Such an approach provides a way to explore qualitative data systematically for patterns, themes, and theoretical constructs (Glaser and Strauss 1967); the raw data involved may consist of interviews, focus groups, oral narratives, and so on. The method can of course be used to generate research questions for further study, but it also allows researchers to begin their inquiry with guiding ideas that frame the domain being explored (Backman and Kyngas 1999:149). One such research question guided this study: what