COMPARING THE FIVE TRADITIONS
Returning to Table 8.2, data analysis and representation have several common and distinctive features among the five traditions. Across all five traditions, the researcher typically begins with creating and organizing files of information. Next, the process of a general reading and memoing of information occurs to develop a sense of the data and to begin the process of making sense of them. Then, all traditions have a phase of description with the exception of grounded theory, in which the investigator seeks to begin building toward a theory of the action or process. Now the analysis procedures begin to depart. Grounded theory and phenomenology have the most detailed, explicated procedure for data analysis. Ethnography and case studies have analysis procedures that are common, and biography represents the least structured procedure. Also, the terms used in the phase of classifying show distinct language among these traditions; what is called open coding in grounded theory is similar to the first stage of classifying(statements) in phenomenology or categorical aggregation in case study research. The researcher needs to become familiar with the definition of these terms of analysis and employ them correctly de pending on tradition of inquiry. The presentation of the data, in turn, reflects the data analysis steps, and it varies from a narration in biography to tabled statements, meanings, and description in phenomenology, to a visual model or theory in grounded theory.