Author: Helen Marshall

The 'Complaints' project, run in 2004 by Sara Charlesworth, was a census of complaints to the Equal Opportunity Commission Victoria, Australia. The original report from the project, made to the EOCV, concerned only the demographic characteristics of the complaints investigated and was based on data collected using SPSS. Sara had always intended to use the complaints material as part of her ongoing work in understanding the nature of discrimination in contemporary Australia, so she also set up a project using NVivo and collected qualitative material to help her understand the 'discourses of discrimination'. She had to put this project on hold for some time, and when she returned to the project her research question had changed. She enlisted my help to re-structure the project. Working together, we began to understand how NVivo enhances the possibilities for iterative interrogation and re-interrogation of one's data.

Setting up the project
The project was already 'set up' when the reanalysis began, so there were no issues of gaining access. There are limitations in the data related to its confidential nature. [More...]

The data
The NVivo project contained rather complex data, sometimes offering a detailed picture of a complaint, and sometimes allowing only a glimpse of the matter. The unit of analysis was the complaint, and each complaint might involve several people. The EOCV files contained both first hand accounts (for example letters from complainants and respondents to the EOCV) and paraphrases made by EOCV staff of telephone conversations. The EOCV does not collect data on complainants, and collects only limited data on the circumstances of a complaint. The data that went into the NVivo project consisted of summaries made by Sara of all complaints received by The Office of Equal Opportunities Victoria, over a three month period. [More...]

Working with data
Sara started the analysis using NVivo2. She worked very much from the ground up, deriving categories from the data and coding the material in each category in nodes. Before she ran out of time to finish fully coding all the documents, her project had a lot of nodes, all with small amounts of content. So when Sara came back to project she felt a bit lost in the maze of nodes. The project was in need of a good tidy up! Sara also had a new direction for her research question which meant that some recoding was needed. We found that taking a 'lumping' approach and coding very broadly helped us re-orient the project, while the ease with which material could be lumped using auto-coding helped the tidying up process. Once the analysis was under way, however, we found that we needed to 'split' our data into finer categories. This time, the splitting did not make an unwieldy project because we were splitting the lumps in order to get a more nuanced answer to specific questions. [More...]

Analysis processes
The start of the real fun was when we began looking at the 'conceptions of discrimination' by 'who's speaking' using matrices. A simple question led to more questions and eventually led us to an understanding of how everyone involved in a complaint tends to see 'structural' factors like the organisation of shifts as both unfair and as simply the way life is.[More...]

Reporting the project
Eventually, we understood how complainants, respondents and the commission share some understanding of discrimination as systemic and some tendency to accept that 'systemic' means 'pity you feel badly treated but that's just how things work - the business case trumps fairness every time'. We understood too how complainants experience discrimination as an affront to human dignity. The complexities of discrimination shown in this project were reported in Sara's Clare Burton lecture. [More...]

Acknowledgment
Many thanks to Sara Charlesworth for help in reconstructing the story of her project.

List of References