Untangling Methodological Commitments in Writing Research: Using Collaborative Secondary Data Analysis to Maximize Interpretive Potentials of Qualitative Data

Abstract

Writing and communication researchers are in the early stages of developing procedures for reusing and maximizing the analytical potentials of qualitative data. Contributing to this effort, we critically reflect on our methodological decision-making process in developing innovative procedures for cross-analyzing two distinct studies. Our reflection responds to the need for published guidance on how to undertake methodological adaptation, the lack of which limits opportunities for other researchers to develop new study procedures to address complex problems. By discussing how and why we made particular methodological choices and adaptations in our collaborative study of faculty and doctoral student writers, we propose collaborative secondary data analysis as a fruitful avenue for qualitative writing researchers and show its potential to enact richer and more equitable research designs.

From Methodology to Method in Genre-Based Ethnographies

“…It follows that the emergent and ordered identification of data sources, techniques for data collection, and boundaries of data collection must be infused by our methodological orientations. This view is clearly shared by other scholars in the field whose recent work explicates and systematizes data collection tools (e.g., Lauer et al, 2013;Olinger, 2020;Thieme & Makmillen, 2017;Van Waes et al, 2021) and/or analytical techniques (e.g., Anson et al, 2019;Dyehouse, 2007;Madden & Tarabochia, 2021;Oddo, 2013;Römer & Wulff, 2010;Rose & Klonis, 2020;VanDerHeide & Newell, 2013).…”

Automating Research in Business and Technical Communication: Large Language Models as Qualitative Coders

“…By demonstrating how genres are enacted through units such as moves, researchers gain not only insight into the rhetorical constitution of genres but also knowledge about the community values, expectations, and problem spaces that genre usage is intended to address. Genre coding is an established research methodology in the fields of rhetoric (Grabill & Pigg, 2012;Kane, 2020;Larson et al, 2016;Omizo, Clark et al, 2019;Omizo, Meeks et al, 2021;Propen & Lay Schuster, 2010), writing studies (Madden & Tarabochia, 2021), and English for specific (Flowerdew, 2016) and academic purposes (Chang & Kuo, 2011;Flowerdew, 2000). In BTC, genre coding has been used to study the contrasting feedback given by novice and expert communities (Dannels & Martin, 2008) and English and Chinese call centers (Xu et al, 2010), artifactual analysis of professional writing genres such as multimodal crowdsourced proposals (Feng et al, 2023), content marketing materials such as websites and portfolios (Wall & Spinuzzi, 2018), job rejection letters (Thominet, 2020), science and engineering Kickstarter proposals (Mehlenbacher, 2017), and industry white papers (Campbell & Naidoo, 2017), with the latter three studies adopting what has become known as Swalesean move analysis.…”