Author: Junko Otani: Osaka University, Graduate School of Human Sciences

Analysis processes
Triangulation (Robson, 2002: 174) was central to my research design. Data triangulation allowed a comparison of media data and field data when doing discourse analysis on loneliness. Media data was related to interviews with media people. Methodological triangulation, a process of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, was employed for analysis of surveys, media data and observation data in community research contexts.

Gender perspectives were employed in all analyses. A gender focus was lacking in public surveys, yet gender was important in qualitative analysis in the media and field sites.

For the Hyogo Health Survey, I compared the issues the survey was looking at over the years and analysed what was concerned by the health department, what was found out and concluded from the previous year's survey, and how it reflected to the following years. I also made tables and graphs comparing the data over the time for the same indicators when comparable indicators and figures were available from different years, and analysed them.

Program logic models, a combination of pattern-matching and time-series analysis (Yin, 1994:118) was employed in my methods. These strategies are useful for explanatory, exploratory, and case studies. Pattern-matching analysis was conducted as follows. Having the Natsu-Aki PRH (Natsuyama PRH and Akiyama PRH) and Fuyuyama PRH enabled some pattern-matching to identify the commonality and variations, for example, the needs of leadership in community generation. At the same time it showed the variations in leadership to be seen by comparing community case studies.

I used NVivo to aid discourse analysis of media data, and content analysis of all interviews, field notes, observational data and relevant documents and to identify the different discourses relevant to the aims and objectives of reconstruction, the definitions of outcomes and measures of success and failure, and the attitudes towards family and individual welfare, and Japanese values.

How did my software affect my analysis? NVivo helped me to analyse the different types of leadership of key people by retrieving by category systematically to follow an individual case study with data scattered across field notes from various dates. For example, the programme assisted me in following a single case of a survivor who changed from a closed attitude to become socially outgoing over the time of his move from TSH to his new life at PRH. It helped me to search for the cases of people who appeared both in TV news and in my fieldwork, and helped me to search for media discourse on Kodokushi in the case of total lack of family. Having the whole set of data in one software package encouraged me to revisit the data over and over again while making an argument and helped me to locate the evidence in the systematic way, not simply by eyeballing. (Richards & Richards, 1991: 38 - 72)

I used Text Search on newly imported documents to locate ideas and get a quick overview of the whole in a short time before coding line by line. I also used Text search, for example, to gather at a node of everything about a key person to understand his/or her philosophy, to make comparisons, and to see consistencies or contradictions by looking at data from different times or different types of data. Some people I met during fieldwork also appeared in TV or newspaper coverage.

Content analysis helped me to see how media attention was shifted to a different focus and away from older people. Content analysis can be extremely laborious and time-consuming. It is a field where computerization has led to substantial benefits (Robson, 2002: 357).

As a part of the analysis process, I made a memo named "Diary, to Supervisor", to record the analysis process and note issues to discuss with my supervisor. This was date/time stamped and included ideas to do next, before forgetting.

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