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Working with words: exploring textual analysis in medical education research
Author(s) -
Park Sophie,
Griffin Ann,
Gill Deborah
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
medical education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.776
H-Index - 138
eISSN - 1365-2923
pISSN - 0308-0110
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2923.2011.04184.x
Subject(s) - deliberation , excellence , context (archaeology) , narrative , interpretation (philosophy) , performative utterance , affordance , data science , computer science , sociology , epistemology , psychology , political science , linguistics , cognitive psychology , paleontology , philosophy , politics , law , biology , programming language
Medical Education 2012: 46 : 372–380 Context Text is familiar to us all. This paper offers an introduction to, and an exploration of, the range of methodological possibilities open to the education researcher who has chosen to use text as a research data source. It encourages a purposeful deliberation of the different textual sources available as data, the range of methodological approaches possible and the types of interpretation that can be adopted when embarking on an empirical study using textual data. Methods Approaches to interpreting text are varied and utilise a range of analytical and interpretative strategies. To illustrate the theoretical points raised within this paper, two contrasting methods were applied to the same text. Tag cloud analysis and performative narrative analysis (PNA) were employed to analyse Chapter 4 of the UK government’s 2010 White Paper Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS . Results The adoption of these contrasting methodologies, which are not currently used extensively in medical education research, revealed that some common issues were identified by both tag clouds and PNA, but, in addition, each approach was able to unveil something unique about the text. Conclusions These two methods highlight the range of affordances, or possibilities, that textual analysis will have on the results. We suggest that medical education researchers should be encouraged to move away from the current dominant and privileged methodologies that seek to provide answers and explore other methods and approaches to textual data that encourage us to question and reflect more deeply.