TO DO THIS WEEK:
I can't lie to you guys. It's not going great over here. In all fairness to me, I've been struck down by illness for like half of last week and all of this week so doing things has been a bit difficult. It's a bit hard getting out of bed in the morning when your sinuses are actively trying to kill you that's all I'm saying.
Bearing that in mind, I think the coding of the TV transcripts hasn't been going too badly. Like I'm definitely not where I want to be with it but I've done two coding runs in a word document that I'm happy with and I've converted it all into a big spreadsheet (Emma really likes the Big Spreadsheet) and I'm now in the process of simplifying, combining codes that are saying the same thing etc.
Pictured: My beautiful word doc vs my beautiful spreadsheet.
While I code I've been thinking about more overarching themes and what I want to focus my discussion on, and I think I actually have at least a few concrete ideas. A lot of its based around points that were raised during the focus groups that I'm noticing patterns of in the TV case studies. Some possible themes I'm considering include the emotions surrounding asexuality and aromanticism (which interestingly mostly seem to be portrayed as negative), the importance of language and whether or not learning the words for asexuality and aromanticism is presented as a kind of end-all be-all solution, the differences the shows present between a-spec and non a-spec people, a possible theme that I'm tentatively calling "the allos just don't get it" (i.e. characters in shows that aren't ace or aro are usually depicted as not understanding these experiences, being confused by them etc.), the difficulties between being ace in a relationship, and maybe the different ways ace vs aro characters are depicted.
So that all sounds wonderful and fine and dandy, the real problem is the situation that's fucking going on with coding the focus groups. Namely, that I've realised it's impossible. In my time plan, I'd given myself three days to code the a-spec focus group transcript. Allowing for multiple coding runs, writing it all up in spreadsheet form, simplifying down etc. that meant I'd need to be able to code the entire thing at least once in one day. To test out whether this was possible, I gave myself an afternoon to work just on coding the a-spec focus group transcript. In order for this to be a viable plan, I'd need to be able to code at least the whole first half of the focus group (the pre screening bit) in that afternoon.
This, as it turned out, was not viable at all.
After being pasted into my TA word document, the first part of the focus group transcript was 69 pages long. By the end of the afternoon, I had coded 29 pages. This, the asute observer may notice, is substantially less than half of 69. And as if that wasn't bad enough, I did realise after the attempt at coding was over that this was with me straight up skipping a thematic analysis step, namely I just hadn't done the familiarisation stage bc I forgot. Maybe you could say me listening to all of it a billion times while transcribing counts as familiarisation, but I sure wasn't thinking deeply about what people were saying while I did that. I was forced to conclude from this that doing the whole in-depth thematic analysis process just isn't going to work for the focus groups, considering the amount of data I have there and the amount of time I had. I'd discussed this with Emma and we talked about it being a good idea to not go through the focus group transcripts line by line, instead looking at whole chunks, going straight into looking at overarching themes as opposed to individual codes, and looking specifically at parts that relate to the themes generated in the TV analysis.
Therefore, I have once again edited my time plan to reflect this. I've given myself a bit longer to work on coding, theme generation, and statistical analysis (? idk if that's actually what I'm planning to do but I do definitely want to figure out some stats) for the TV case studies, and now just have theme generation for the focus group as opposed to coding.
The time plan currently looks like this! In hindsight I probably should have been adding in screenshots of the previous versions as I went along to demonstrate how it evolved but hopefully my frantic explanations will be enough. At least I know for next time (and at the rate I'm going there almost certainly will be a next time)!
Had my tutorial with Emma this week. Wish I'd had more to show for the tutorial but unfortunately transcribing took way longer than expected so coding has not gone as well as I wish it had. Anyway here's some main points: