An interrupted long moment

It has been some time since I have not posted on the blog, which I created with quite interest. During this time I have been taking notes, being in the storm of writing my pilot study, which still creates tension and with continues not understanding on my site of the righteousnesses of the process. Sometimes it feels impossible with all of it's possibilities.

When I left USA a month and a half ago, I faced another level of technological difficulties, which I was not aware. This is the reason even not publishing for sometimes, but I kept on writing my dairy. I was just able to figure out how I can access the blog and be able to add information, when foreign user is used as wireless system. This was another overcoming, which took a lot of time and exploration, but the process is the most important and the struggle as in life could be become a base for realization.

In the following posting my journey with the Qualitative Data Analysis software "Ethnograph" will be presented:

The real journey with technology began at Lesley University two years ago, when I started the PhD. program in Expressive Arts Therapy. My mind is going back twelve years ago, when the cell phones where becoming fashionable in US. Almost everyone had a phone around me, and I remember having no desire or a needy sense to join this mass technological shift, which was happening.

Going even back in the 1980’s (at that time living in Bulgaria), we had no home phone. It was the time during the communistic system. My memory brings the image of a public phone constructed on the facade of a residential building, one of the several in the whole neighborhood. Even now I could see a line of people waiting to have their turn. Thinking about this, it feels so special, hearing the stories and the jokes people were sharing while waiting. The time did not matter. People were very gentle, patient and tolerant with each other. There was no anxiety, madness or argument.

Coming back to the present day and thinking about the younger generations being brought with so much technology and in the same time disconnected to nature. What kind of world is shaping in their mind? So much has changed. Referring to the main universal law of existence: the law of Duality…Light and Darkness…Good and Bad…Negative and Positive, seems allowing us to find something but loosing something else. I have felt a level of confusion, struggling to find balance. The need of the human race to make life practical, easy and convenient, has let technology to make our lives on one site much easier, on another, we just start to realize some of its negative effects. I never felt excited about technological discoveries: phones, computers and others. Two years ago

I let go of TV and feel and I feel any moment more meaningful, without slipping by. There were times; I felt that there must be something wrong with me. I was just accepting it and using some of it to the minimum. On the other hand connecting with nature, observing, feeling the spirit of it… I have made choices to create authentically, to be purely creative even in organizing data.

My technological usage was limited to Internet Search, E-mail, Skype and computer type writing. Things changed two years ago and it seems that technology is entering my life more and more. Honestly, this entering was met with a lot of resistance and unnatural feeling.

It seems that my main concern has been not to become dependent on it, which I see is happening all around me. One of the Lesley students from a previous class just this summer shared, totally shocked by her own discovery, that she feels empty, lost and confused if she does not have her cell phone with her all the time, as well checking her E-mail many times during the day, as well having her TV on from the moment she arrives home. This made a huge effect on me!

From the time of making a decision to join the Analysis Group and selecting Ethnographer for our choice of Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) software, what has happened is a shift in openness? The next lines will be devoted to this experience.

The first realization, as I was finding and reviewing references and research on and around the topic of QDA, was that there are approximately twenty software programs developed and Ethnographer was the first one, which gently moved into silence…not seeming to be the preferred one at this moment. I was beginning to understand, was that what this programs are actually doing is not really “analysis”, but organization and data management. I wonder how the term got accepted so widely, which does not precisely reflect what the process of QDA is.

Contrary to the developers, who define the process of the program as simple and not lineal, but more spiral, my experience was flat and lineal. I have found no actual tutorials for direction of how to use it but the manual within Demo Version. I approached the manual just to give myself a little orientation, but I found myself very lost and not getting anywhere. So, I decided just to go in and explore intuitively, learning basic things from playing with it: from how to transfer text,

create files, categories, sorting, coding, shifting etc.

Another realization was the dependency on the amount of data that Ethnograph requires to start the actual processing. It took quite sometime to realize that.

As I was exploring it, what started to intrigue me was the actual idea and thought process put into the software and the strictly logical pathway I started to sense. I felt that this is of an essential importance of how the program is going to process the actual data.

My research brings together qualitative, quantitative and art-based data and my main struggle has been integrating these data components in the analysis. I have designed, integrated expressive arts therapy session including music, dance-movement, art making. The main intention is to study the possible effects of Expressive arts therapy (ET) on cognitive memory impairment.

Bellow are further realizations (during the process):

· The core of analysis within Ethnographer and any other QDA reflects the mental process behind it, which can result in quite different findings

· I compared data analysis which I did by Ethnographer vs. manually organized by me and I found that the results for example in coding come quite differently

· Analyzing data manually, considering the nature of my research allows me to be in a better level of awareness of how different parts are connected creating the whole. This is of an extraordinary importance to keep higher level of objectivity

· The nature of the creative process cares tremendous unknown and abstraction that we are trying to depict with a very rational, logical thought, so we can analyze it

· I can see QDA software can be a very useful tool for a more linear research. Art data is quite specific and multi dimensional, which most important part is coming from the actual art form

· Analyzing data manually allows me to go beyond preset up pattern of thought, a framework and further rediscover possibilities. I am finding very importantly that text and images have to have for me togetherness and be visually connected. In this way I can move form image to text from text to image

· Freedom of movement within the process of analysis is of a great importance to me to new depths of understanding

Knowing… could only happen allowing myself to be in the process…where there is tension there is happening…discovery…

“No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge…

And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and

measure, but he cannot conduct you thither…
For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.
…And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one of you be

alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth…”