Concepts enable you to make sense of your data.
Anna's (Aberg et al 2004) research was about what quality of life means in the lives of men and women aged over 80 years (what she calls the oldest old). She used in-depth interviews of older people, their carers and people close to them, and participant observation in people's homes in rehabilitation units and in care homes. When it came to writing up, Anna decided to produce a series of papers and articles rather than one single report. However, the first things she had to write were descriptive. She told of how she did the research, and what changes had been taking place in the health service that had led to the research; she described the different ways 'quality of is used by different groups, then she described her respondents a little. For Anna, there were core respondents, the older people, and other respondents, their carers and close ones.She found it necessary to include some description of each of these, though depending on what she was writing she included more or less of this. She found it had to be collected in one place in the first place before she could proceed to the next phase of analysis of findings. This is the phase where she really wanted to try to find some answers to her questions what does quality of life mean for older people? One thing she had found as she had been doing her research and sorting through her notes and data was that people seemed to talk a lot about balancing expectations, on the one hand, against real possibilities, on the other older people often have physical reasons for not being able to do certain things, and so what might contribute to quality of life, for example visiting a friend, might be a physical impossibility So, the older person, in order to achieve a balance in his or her life, might reduce expectations in order to meet them more realistically. For Anna, the concept of balance became a crucial organising concept in her work.