Institutional ethnography and data analysis: making sense of data dialogues

Abstract

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that investigates how everyday experiences are coordinated by work done with texts in organisations. Methodologically, IE relies on interviews, observations and document review to produce data. Yet strategies for data analysis in IE have not received as much attention as have issues of data production, the latter of which can be further refined. Although many types of qualitative data analysis have recently been developed in the social sciences, in this article I assess two: the listening guide and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Contributing to debates about qualitative data analysis and IE, I compare the listening guide and IPA to evaluate whether these forms of data analysis can be used to supplement IE. I argue that there are five points of convergence between the listening guide and IE, which institutional ethnographers can build on in future research, analysis and writing.

Keywords:

• qualitative data analysis
• institutional ethnography
• listening guide
• interpretative phenomenological analysis

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sean Hier, Chris Hurl, and Benjamin Christensen for their helpful comments. Thanks to Dorothy Smith and Andrea Doucet for all their amazing contributions to sociology.

Notes

1. This focus on cultural discourses and social/structural forces in the listening guide acts as a corrective to the subjectivist tendency in much narrative-based research and analysis. As McNay (2003, p. 7) puts it, ‘a danger with asserting the centrality of narrative in an understanding of subjectivity and agency is the tendency to render narrative a privileged term which encompasses all aspects of experiences and selfhood’.