Data Generation And Analyses

By Author: Alexia.White
Total Articles: 41

Data in this article mainly come from Orlonia Phillips's life history interview, which took place in March 2007. The literacy-in-persons protocol was used to guide this audiotaped discussion, which took place in the classroom where she works as a paraprofessional and lasted four hours. Using Brandt (2001), Johnson (2007), Key (1998), and Thompson (2000) as guides, the literacy-in-persons life history interview protocol was developed around the following domains: general life Merrell Shoes circumstances, literacy in the home, literacy in school, literacy in community, and church (see Table 1). A follow-up interview was conducted in October 2007 in Orlonia's home. Data used in this article also come from a life history interview that Amy conducted with Orlonia's husband, Meggs Phillips, as well as field notes recorded to document the process of creating P Is for Pinesville.

We began data analysis by reading the interview data to gain a general understanding of Orlonia's life. We read and coded specifically for literacy practices and events that we identified within Orlonia's recollections. We created a table in which we plotted out literacy practices, events, and texts (see Table 2). For analytic purposes, we defined texts as objects and interactions from which individuals derive meaning. This table not only helped in data reduction but also helped to organize conceptually Orlonia's literacy-in-persons.

Conceptual organization helped reduce data further, identifying repertoires of literate practice (Rubinstein-Avila, 2007) that Orlonia engaged in throughout her life: everyday or quotidian literacies, space literacies, place literacies, critical literacies, gender literacies, health literacies, and church literacies. Studying such repertoires can highlight how adults' and adolescents' literacies are located within frames of history and biography—or how the residue from past experiences informs one's literacy-in-persons. In the following sections, we discuss three repertoires of literacy Merrell Boots practices as they are situated within biographical and historical frames: quotidian literacies, space literacies, and critical literacies. We focus on the quotidian, space, and critical literacy repertoires because in our repeated readings of the data, they played the most prominent role in delineating Orlonia's literacy-in-persons.