Analyse

What?

Analysis, in the context of research, entails penetrating and structuring material so that it answers the questions posed. The work of analysis requires specialist competence, which gives rise to one of the biggest challenges in joint knowledge production. The material may consist, for example, of sets of measurements, questionnaire responses or transcribed texts from focus groups and interviews.

How?

I. Joint verbal analyses
A lecture or workshop can be followed by reflective meetings in which the members discussed their impressions of what they had experienced. These
analyses can be scheduled and follow some kind of structure. It is important to capture spontaneous thoughts and reflections but these meetings do not have to be structured in the sense of building on explicit theories or models.

"... But the practitioners don't take the theoretical approach (to the material)... so we didn't really do that in the working groups, but we talked about what we can see and so on, but more often than not, going through it becomes more a kind of repetition of what's happened. In a way, of course, that's also analysis, but not so structured, perhaps."

" … practitioners have absolutely no regard for the (scientific) disciplines"

II. Joint written analyses
Data collection from a project generates large quantities of written material. It can be several hundred pages of text from focus group interviews, observations of workshops and meetings to be read and analysed. It is important to share the responsibility to read transcripts, listen to tapes and perform the analyses in order to present the material to each other in the group.

" the understanding wasn't hidden somewhere, but it's there all the time... and we try to argue our way forward step by step… Such a huge amount of material has accumulated from what we've done that it's been essential to deal with it bit by bit."

" This group really wrote together. Well, I wrote, but it's their statements. We started producing a text after the first meeting, and then we sort of talked about that text at the next meeting, and developed it. And so we sifted out more and more."

III. Specific purely scientific analyses
As well as forming the basis for analyses carried out jointly by the project groups, the project can of course be used as a basis for specialist analyses. To
perform a specialist analyses is useful in the process of writing a scientific article but such an analyses can also be useful to practitioners.

"It's been fascinating to see one's own work written in a form that increasingly develops towards a scientific text"

Look out for! - Why do not practitioners write?

It is sometimes a question of time. Writing takes much more time than the 5-10% of working hours which many practitioners spent on the pilot projects.

It is not always a question of time. Some of the researchers who took part in the working groups did not spend more than about 10% of their working hours on the project, either. We therefore assume that writing is also a question of how practitioners and researchers regard their respective roles in project groups.

"Who are we writing for?" Some practitioners reported that they would like to have written but felt unsure about who they would be writing for. There was no clear plan for how the insights and knowledge generated in the project were to be of benefit to their regular workplaces.