From Transforming Qualitative Data by Harry Wolcott (Sage 1994), with additions and adaptation

Description: "What is going on here?" Data consist of observations made by the researcher and/or reported to the researcher by others (e.g., subject of the illness narrative interview)

No such thing as "pure" description; we always construct the data by singling out some things worthy of notice and putting other material in the background (your perception filters the data). Select a focus for which you can provide relevant and appropriate detail. What is the purpose of your study of "illness narratives" (both academic and personal purposes)? "Tell the story. Then tell how that happened to be the way you told it."

Strategies for telling the story:

1. Chronological order: forward or reverse.
2. Researcher or narrator order: how did the subject narrate the account? By what logic of organization did they present the story of becoming ill and of healing?
3. Progressive focusing: zoom in and out from broad context to particulars of the case, or from theoretical issues to the subject’s account.
4. Critical or key event: select an incident in the narrator’s story that seems to reveal or reflect the whole issue, conflict, belief system, etc.
5. Plot and characters: how do the individuals involved in the story interact? What role do you as narrator play?
6. Follow an analytical framework
7. Tell the story from multiple perspectives, each from an observer with different disciplinary interests or who notices bodily, mental, or soul-related elements.
8. Write a mystery: Identify your central problem or question and present the data as gradually collected evidence

1. Highlight your findings as described in your "descriptive" section; how did you answer your central question? What are the relationships between elements of the story above?
2. Flesh out the analytical framework that guided your data collection (e.g., Kleinman’s questions).
3. Identify patterned regularities in the data: what words or phrases seem to go together repeatedly in the narrator’s account (e.g., pain and depression, medical and reality)?
4. Compare with another case: e.g., illness narratives in the first three books for this quarter or from last quarter.
5. Contextualize in a broader analytical framework: connect to theoretical perspectives in program books or to your own expectations, experience, conventional wisdom, social norms (but remember to keep the focus on the narrator’s account and the central issues).
6. Propose a redesign or follow up for your interview: what have you learned about gathering illness narratives? What is missing for this particular account to provide significant conclusions?

Interpretation: processual questions of meanings and contexts: "How does it all mean?" "What is to be made of it all?" This is the place for speculation, but it should still be grounded in the data, not reaching too far for conclusions or following tangents. What does your limited research actually "show"?

1. Extend the analysis to other possible cases or pose questions that arise from the data for further study.
2. Infer from the data: how can you imagine this case providing further insight? Inferences are conclusions that cannot be stated with certainty but are nonetheless consistent with the facts presented.
3. Stop with analysis and just point to what is needed next.
4. Do as the assignment directs or as informed persons suggest in feedback sessions, acknowledging their input.
5. Turn to theory: link this case study with larger issues in illness and healing, psychology, religious studies, movement theory, theories of body-mind-soul connection.
6. Connect with personal experience (again, keeping focused on the case and issues at hand).
7. Challenge the analysis that another author or theorist might give to this narrative.