What themes does Dr Mah Hussain-Gambles draw on to talk about transitional moments in her life?

Important: These pages provide guidance on how to write your assignment. Please ensure you read all of this information right through until the end. Before you start work on this assignment, please ensure that you have read the Assessment Guidance specific to this module and are familiar with the advice in Social Sciences Assessment Information. These sources contain support and guidance that you may need to write your TMA, including, for example, advice on plagiarism, referencing and the marking system. Note that failure to comply with relevant guidance could result in the loss of marks or other penalties. Qualitative mini-project report Conduct a thematic analysis of an audio clip from an interview held in the Oral History of British Science archive of the British Library. Then, write an empirical report of three themes you have identified in your analysis of the interview in answer to the following research question: What themes does Dr Mah Hussain-Gambles draw on to talk about the transitional moments in her life? Word limit: 2000 words (excluding title, abstract, references and appendices) On the following pages you will find: learning outcomes addressed by this assignment student notes for this assignment. Tutor feedback Before submitting your TMA, consider if there are any areas or aspects for which you would particularly like to receive feedback. Add this as a note at the beginning of your TMA so your tutor has the opportunity to focus their comments on your concerns. Your tutor will continue to provide standard feedback too. For TMA 04 you will produce an empirical report that draws on psychological topics and methods covered in Block 3. One of the key themes of Block 3 concerns how we come to understand periods of fixity and moments of transition across the lifespan. This assignment develops this theme by asking you to use thematic analysis to explore how people make sense of themselves in their social world. This will allow you to consolidate your understanding of how psychological theory and qualitative research can be applied to a specific context. There are three stages to this TMA: data collection, data analysis, and report writing. In the following sections you will find guidance on how to complete each of these stages. Make sure that you read all of this guidance before beginning your assignment. Relevant material The following resources will be useful in completing your report: The topic material from Week 25, including Book 3, Chapter 5 and the online activities which discuss change and continuity across the lifespan, in particular in relation to transition. The methods material from Week 24 on thematic analysis, and the project material in Week 26. You will also find Chapter 6 of the DE100 textbook Investigating Methods useful. You need to identify a minimum of two relevant peer-reviewed psychology journal articles that you have found through an independent literature search. If you do not include and discuss two relevant journal articles, you will lose five marks from the overall score for your TMA. You may find it helpful to revisit the guidance in Week 2 and Week 20 on ‘Asking questions about the literature’. Stage 1: Data collection For this mini-project, the data has been provided for you. It is becoming more and more common for researchers to use naturally occurring data, such as documents or newspapers, or pre-existing data – data that has been collected by other researchers or for different reasons. The UK Research Councils keep a database of the research projects they have funded and of the data collected by those projects. In this assignment, you will be using a recording from the British Library’s Voices of Science. This is a collection of interviews with 100 leading UK scientists and engineers. If you are interested, you can explore the resource yourself by following the link above. As well as the audio recording of the interview, you have been provided with two versions of the interview transcript – a PDF and a Word document. You will need to download one of these for your analysis. Both versions of the transcript contain line numbers which you should refer to in your report when discussing extracts from the interview. You should include a list of initial codes, developed codes and themes in your appendix. Stage 2: Data analysis You will be conducting a thematic analysis of the interview using the skills that you learned about in DE100 in Chapter 6 of Investigating Methods and developed in Week 24 and Week 26 of this module. Do go back to refresh your memory if and when you like. Data analysis is always an iterative process that goes back and forth. Start by familiarising yourself with the data. Listen to the audio recording and read the transcript a number of times. Researchers always need to read a transcript a number of times to familiarise themselves with the content and to think about how it relates to the research question. Remember to keep the research question in mind as you listen and read: What themes does Dr Mah Hussain-Gambles draw on to talk about transitional moments in her life? Audio player: Dr Mah Hussain-Gambles Dr Mah Hussain-Gambles Transcript of Dr Mah Hussain-Gambles interview with line numbers (Word version) Transcript of Dr Mah Hussain-Gambles interview with line numbers (PDF version) You can then move on to coding. As you have been learning over the last few weeks, you should go through the transcript a few times, making notes and/or annotating as you go along, identifying and labelling sections that you think are relevant or interesting. Move from initial codes to developed ones. Coding can take quite a bit of time, and sometimes it can be helpful to go away and come back fresh to the task the next day. Here is a reminder of the Helpful questions for code development you learned about in Week 24: ● What? What is this about? What phenomena are mentioned? Which aspects of the phenomena are mentioned (or not mentioned)? ● Who? Who appears in the text? What actors are involved? What roles do they play? ● How? How were the actions achieved? What strategies were used to achieve the goal? ● When? When did the situation described happen? How long did it go on for? ● Where? Where did it happen? What locations or places are mentioned? ● Why? What reasons are given for the situation/phenomenon taking place? What intentions are described here? What is the purpose? Once you have completed this stage, you can move from the developed codes to identify themes. As you have seen, a group of codes that go together represent a pattern in the data, which is a theme. Look for relationships between the codes and then consider a meaningful title or label for the theme that you believe captures what the relationship is about. Not all the codes you have identified will necessarily be used as they might not fit into a clear theme or be relevant to your research question. Remember that the process of identifying themes is iterative so you can go back and forth from codes through to themes. Once you have identified your themes, try to write a few notes on each that address the research question. Then choose three themes that you would like to interpret in your report. The interpretation can be thought of as an explanation of your themes, which is built up and supported through the presentation of quotes or excerpts from the data. When presenting data excerpts, remember you will need to include the line numbers as they appear in the transcript. Qualitative researchers don’t let the data speak for themselves but provide an account of what the data means by explaining how they fit into the theme they have identified and for the research study. Stage 3: Writing your report Having completed your analysis, you can move on to writing up your report. Remember, when tackling this task, you may find it easier to write the sections of the report in a different order to how they will be finally presented. In Week 24 you completed activities on the different sections required for a qualitative report. Make sure you revisit those resources prior to writing up your report as they offer clear guidance on what information is required for each section. In Week 26, this process was more specifically tailored to TMA 04 and included a suggested order for writing the different sections of your report. Ensure that you follow that guidance closely. Methodology section For the purposes of this assignment we ask you to organise your Methodology section using the following subtitles: Design, Participants, Materials, Procedures, Ethical considerations and Reflexivity. Writing it up in this way serves as a check that all relevant information is being included. Ethical considerations Although the module team has dealt with many of the ethical issues while planning this project, you need to ensure that the project as a whole complies with the Code of Human Research Ethics published by the British Psychological Society. You may find page 12 of the document particularly helpful with respect to the use of existing data. In your Methodology section, you must include a discussion of how you addressed ethical considerations when analysing your data and writing your report. Remember that a key aspect of ethical research is that participants should be treated with respect. You should ensure that you adhere to this principle at all times. Indeed, show respect for everyone related to the research process (for example, participants, other researchers, readers) as you write up your analysis and even when informally discussing the project with other students. Reflexivity As you have learned, reflexivity is a key component of any qualitative analysis. You might want to revisit the discussion on this in Week 22. As we have mentioned, qualitative researchers don’t always take the same approach to writing the discussion of reflexivity. Sometimes, it is woven through the report when relevant to the specific point, or often it is included as part of the Methodology or Discussion sections. For the purposes of DE200, please include your discussion of reflexivity in the Methodology section. Here are some questions that will help guide you in reflecting on your work: ● How might the research question have impacted on your coding? ● What might have guided your choice of quotes for inclusion in the report? ● How are ethics relevant in the use of pre-existing data? ● How did you check the transparency of your interpretations?