Pre-Existing, Multimodal, Creative Data Analysis: Is It All Just a Mess?

This paper will discuss the challenges in the analysis of data from a project on education undergraduate students’ placement experiences, at one UK university. The data set included individual and group activities that the students completed in 7 workshops that took place alongside the placement, reflective accounts, placement logs, and semi-structured interviews with 7 students (Oliveira and Daya, forthcoming). More precisely, the data set included textual and visual data that was not all designed for the research, but was part of the placement module that the students attended. The reflective nature and variety of the data posed challenges to the researcher that had to figure out what to do with it (Wolcott, 1994) – How to incorporate the different types of data? How to approach individual and group tasks? The paper will problematize these choices and expand on how thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2023) was combined with a systematic visuo-textual approach (Brown and Collins, 2021) to analyse the data.