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You have 4 interview transcripts from a study with people who’ve worked in significant positions along the “food supply chain” from farming to manufacturing to retail. Their experience is mostly in the UK and in suppliers connected to the retailed Marks & Spencer. I selected out pieces from the interviews that cover the topic of “the food chain” including concepts such as local food, “food miles”, food safety and convenience foods. There’s also a short file (Interviews.doc) giving brief info on the respondents.
These are fairly short extracts from the full interviews – you can see in the Interviews.doc file that the researchers, who were using an approach called “Life Histories”, collected an average of 10 hours of talk per respondent. These are part of 20 interviews and focus groups that were done for the research. Names of places and people have been “anonymised” in these extracts by substituting fictional names. I removed names of companies and place names but I left in the names of the supermarkets and those of historical business figures (Lord Sieff etc.), since they’re now public names.
There’s also a short extract from a journal article that the researcher published, where he “writes up” some of his findings from the research project. He’s talking about more than just the question proposed here (and more than just these four transcript extracts), but it shows an example of how to create research findings from this set of qualitative data and analysis.
Note: Since there’s a lot of discussion (especially in the interview with FD) about supermarket chains, I thought it might be useful to explain that in the UK there were at that time no “discounters” i.e. no Aldi or Lidl. Generally, Waitrose and M&S are considered “upmarket”; Tesco and Sainsbury “mid-market”; and Asda and Morrison’s probably the “low end”. Asda was owned at that time by Walmart. M&S is a much smaller outlet in food but is classified as a department store and so isn’t in the Kantar grocery-retail analysis – shown below are the current market shares.
1. Propose 4 codes (only 4) that might apply to the general research topic (based on any research or theory you’ve encountered in your courses this semester, or if not, on whatever prior expectations you might have).
2. Type your codes into an initial Coding Guide in the Miles & Huberman style – code names and a short explanation.
3. As you read through the transcripts mark (“Code”) any segments that relate to your initial codes. Use markers, multi-coloured post-it’s, or highlighting in Word, as you prefer. (choose a different colour for each code).
4. Note two other themes that you see emerge (inductive) and add those (and the explanations) to your Coding Guide.
5. Construct a matrix (i.e. a table), with the 4 cases (i.e. interviews or respondents) as rows and your 6 themes as columns. Include short quotes in the cells. Also include simple scores like “High” “Moderate”, “Low”, “Absent”, or “Strong” to Weak” – whatever makes best sense to you. You can do this in a table in Word or you may prefer to use Excel.
6. Write-up an interpretation of what you found out (½ page to 1 page in length).
Submit a single Word file for the assignment, containing
(i) your Coding Guide (6 themes, indicating whether initial or inductive, and your short explanations of them)
(ii) your analysis matrix, 3 rows, 6 columns – where the cells have short quotes and scores. If you created the matrix in Excel, then paste it into the Word file
(iii) your interpretation (“write-up”).
Note: There’s no need to submit your marked-up transcripts.
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