To analyse your interviews you can do the following.

Store one interview per pdf (or.doc) file. These are your “source” files for your "document library". {Do not try to enter citation data (BibTeX)!}

Tell Qiqqa to monitor the subdirectories you have stored the pdf files in. Qiqqa is free from http://www.qiqqa.com/70557 Qiqqa manages your “document library”, not of material you are citing, but which you will be studying, as your data. You may already pick up a good quote or two to highlight, and bring into your research report.

Tag each file with useful tags for filtering, retrieval and reporting, e.g.. K11, K12, old design, redesigned, Private school, Government school. With a bit of luck you have already put the interviews into separate subdirectories, so this process can be automated. Feel free to use multiple tags per file.

Use Qiqqa to suggest themes that are in your data. (!)

Now draw up a different, tentative list of the things you want to look for inside your interviews. Read through each of your interviews, tagging each with what you are interested in researching. E.g.

cognitive xxxx

visual info

verbal info

spacing

student preference

inference

diagram

illustration

readability

questioning

self explanation

worked example ...

Revise the list for a second pass. Highlight those parts of the interviews you wish to quote. Export your annotated notebook to a word processor.

Sort, link, report and publish!

Technically, the above process used to be called coding. Today we tag with multiple tags, not just one code. You can find out too much stuff about coding in the archives of the publications of SAGE. Also consult ERIC.

Mayring uses the term "category" where I recommend using "tag", allowing more than one category. The Figure 1 is a more refined

version of my crude "second pass" idea.

I would recommend revising tags at both the 10% and 50% analysis points. Continuous revision of tags is possible today, but your supervisor may frown on that.

I think that the research question will be on the lines of: "Is this approach to Maths Teaching beneficial?"

Alexa & Zuell survey the older types of software, which do not suggest trends in your data, or explore relations in your data or allow you to draw brainstorms.

Just remember to make two libraries in Qiqqa: One for your references, and one for your interviews.

You need to tag the annotations in your second library with tags drawn from your actual research sub-questions.

@Christine: I deliberately left it open for Virginia to expand on “beneficial”, if indeed that be her thought.

Yes, you can multiple tag each interview “externally”, file by

file, to facilitate reporting and also you can multiple tag (with a different set) your annotations inside each interview. The latter could be on the different dimensions (your “categories”) and the intensity of each of those

dimensions e.g., “very happy with drawing”, “happy with verbal”, “very unhappy with practical example”; OR

“because I think with symbols”, “because numbers sing to me”...

Using tags frees you from the constraint of having to be a cataloguer of species and genus, to allow for new findings to be labelled two ways. The newly discovered unicorn can be labelled as both a horned goat and as a horse. The unanticipated interview with a child who says “because numbers sing to me”, and also says “because numbers have colours” can simply be given two tags for the paragraph or even the sentence(s).

Probably it is advisable not to try to analyse interview(s) with too many foci at once. Rather go through (search through) all the interviews looking for feelings about visual depictions, then look for feelings about practical examples. This is facilitated by doing a Qiqqa full library search or an individual interview search for “drawing OR illustration OR graph” (in tags, or text -- which then gives the search results in context). Similarly, search for “Because OR As OR Since”. If you save these search strings, then your research is easily replicated!

If you want to investigate the links between feelings and reasons, you search (tags or text!) for interviews that contain e.g., “(drawing OR illustration OR graph) AND (Because OR As OR Since)”

You now have an excuse to spend that grant for the new year on a new Windows laptop!

Thanks for the suggestions!

I need to take a step back here and ask for some recommendations of good research done on teacher interviews. If I could seem some exemplar work, that would give me an idea of what to look at. Once I understand that, I will definitely look into coding strategies you discussed.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I need to take a step back here and ask for some recommendations of good research done on teacher interviews. If I could seem some exemplar work, that would give me an idea of what to look at. Once I understand that, I will definitely look into coding strategies you discussed.

Go to scholar.google.com and give it "teacher interviews". Follow the heavy citations. Rogers, Porter ...