Rethinking rigour: Analytic dilemmas of a scientist morphing into a social scientist

In transitioning from scientist to social scientist - and from teacher to teacher-researcher - and with the lived experiences of marginalised students as my inspiration, I confronted thought provoking issues. Whilst I was drawn to an ethnographic approach, settling on a suitable analytic stance, was messier. I was determined to keep students voices to the fore and have sufficient rigour, reliability and reproducibility. I discuss the rationale for my eventual choice of qualitative analytic approach - drawn from grounded theory techniques - detailing the specific analytic steps, incorporating free writing, initial coding, clustering, memoing, focused coding and diagramming. I make the process transparent and open to critique - providing detail often glossed over. Through the replication of a complete memo, within which I detail how I utilise deeply embedded web-like diagramming even at the early stages of analysis, I illustrate how tentative social processes are recognised. I find this more detailed, augmented process to be suitably rigorous. This augmented process, with early use of deeply embedded diagramming, offers an analytic technique for other researchers also.