Because of the need for an understanding of the everyday experiences of school
library media specialists, I used qualitative data collection and analysis because it
provides the researcher the opportunity to understand behavior in the context of the
subject’s own special environment (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). The strength of qualitative
narrative is the rich description that yields generalizations documented by specific
examples of data from the field (Glazier & Powell, 1992). Thus, this qualitative study of
four school library media specialists at an elementary school, middle school, and high
school benefited by providing a naturalistic, descriptive study. The data analysis in
Chapter 4 was based on field notes from one month at each site, interviews with the
superintendent, three principals, the library supervisor, a college professor, 18 classroom
teachers, and four school library media specialists as well as pertinent written documents.
Summary and Conclusions