Lynn Butler-Kisber

This article presents musical memoing as an arts-based reflective process and as a way to engage with and represent data in qualitative inquiry. Used in conjunction with more well-known approaches to data analysis (constant comparison and narrative analysis), musical memos serve to pull forth and highlight salient understandings emerging in the analyses. Moreover, musical memoing allows for the creation of concise yet holistic representations of the data, which can be performed in an embodied manner to enhance understanding of phenomena. The role of musical memoing is discussed within the context of a research study carried out at McGill University entitled, “Exploring a University Teacher’s Approach to Incorporating Music in a Cognition Psychology Course.” A brief overview of the research findings is presented, as well as the methodological implications musical memoing has for future research.

In this paper the authors describe how the use of multiple methods of qualitative data collection over a two-year period, including interviews, concept maps and journals, and the analysis of data through visual inquiry, categorizing (constant comparison thematic analysis), and connecting (narrative analysis) provided a more comprehensive understanding of the process of evolution in college teachers’ perspectives on teaching and learning within a professional development program than would have emerged with only a single method . Concept maps provided an initial visual footprint of teachers’ emerging perspectives. Categorization revealed four major patterns across teachers’ perspectives. Connecting the data through narrative summaries exposed a contextualized rendition of aspects of individual teachers’ perspectives. Each of these three approaches offers a unique lens into qualitative data analysis, and when used together, they clarify important aspects of the phenomenon under investigation.