Infusing Participants’ Voices Into Grounded Theory Research

Abstract

This article augments the author’s grounded theory study of student and teacher interactions in alternative education classrooms by presenting poetic transcription as a way to portray the essences and experiences of the participants. The author builds on the experimental writing traditions of other researchers to embrace her own experiences as a classroom teacher in crafting the poems out of the participants’ words. In so doing, the author actively interacts with the texts to co-construct new meaning that elucidates research findings. Utilizing her position between the worlds of research and practice, the author crafts the poems to convey personalities, victories, and complexities involved in these classrooms. This application of the methodology of poetic transcription allows for a deeper understanding of students’ and teachers’ experiences in these schools.

The Poetics of Professionalism Among Dialysis Technicians

“…I turned to the practice of poetic transcription of interview transcripts in order to illuminate the emergent themes of professionalism in a manner that better reflected my perceptions of the technicians' experience, expertise, and identity (Richardson, 1992a(Richardson, , 1992b(Richardson, , 2000. Poetic transcription departs from the typical representation of grounded theory findings, adding a valuable alternative that shares the goals of grounded theory analysis and fulfills the additional goal of highlighting marginalized voices : "the poems reclaim the individual experiences that recede in the generalized theory (Kennedy 2009(Kennedy , p. 1419. Poetic representations of research use artful phrases and arrangement of words to convey meaning and emotion (Faulkner, 2010; for exemplars see Austin, 1996;Carless & Douglas, 2009;Chawla, 2006;González, 1998;Hartnett, 2003;Prendergast, 2007).My combination of grounded theory analysis and poetic representation represents a merging of aesthetic and empirical rationalities Professionalism in Dialysis 14 that is intended to question this dichotomy through inclusion of both meaningful categories and unique experiences of individuals within the same text (Todres, 1998).…”

“…Researchers follow a variety of rules when engaging in poetic transcription. While Richardson stated only that she retained her participant's words, syntax, and grammar while editing a transcript (Richardson, 1992a), Glesne (1997) and Kennedy (2009) elaborated on more detailed processes. I selected bounded, chronologically ordered excerpts from interview transcripts.…”

“…I repeated this process for each of the four themes. The selected transcript excerpts came from four participants (see Kennedy, 2009), in contrast to other researchers whose poetic transcriptions were grounded in a single participant's transcript (e.g., Carr, 2003;Furman, 2006;Glesne, 1997).…”

Feminist Dialogic Pedagogical Spaces in Teacher Education: Practical Inclusivity, Eye-opening and Change

“…Free verse aligns with the critical spirit of my inquiry. It has been argued that free verse ‘conveys this sense of freedom and a break from the rules’ (Faulkner, 2009, p. 97) and that they ‘better contextualize the grounded theory study’ (Kennedy, 2009, p. 1419). Also, the poetic re-presentation (Glesne, 1997, p. 204) invites the reader to become the co-author of feminist dialogic pedagogy and its multivocality of meanings, situated knowledges and dialogic actions of empowerments.…”

Poetic Renarration of Disenfranchised Grief in Relation to Client Suicide

“…In offering up these poems to a wider audience I am mindful, nonetheless, of Kennedy's (2009) observation about the inherent "risk" that such work poses. As she states, "[We are] pushing the limits of traditional research by fragmenting voices, challenging trustworthiness, and offering a text of data analysis that embodies few conventions" (Richardson & St Pierre, 2005 cited in Kennedy, 2009Kennedy, , p. 1419."…”