yanking my hair out coding research, but initial results...

I was thinking about the process of research - again - big surprise. I've been coding for content in my research articles, trying to find out how we address competency. I realized that as long as the process can be duplicated, it doesn't matter how you arrived at the process (clean or dirty).

It has been difficult to code as I've been "courting" the data, trying to get it to reveal itself. I've been trying NOT to impose my preconceived ideas, too late in some cases, and where I have imposed I've tried to be very clear that I did impose and the reasons for imposing. My first crack at it didn't work, I didn't go granular enough. On the second/third shot at it the data shaped itself, very nicely, into CATEGORIES of, or approaches to definitions. But what has been very interesting in reveal, is that there are the definitions created by the authors and there is their text about the definitions, in some cases two different animals. In order to better understand both what they were thinking (text) and saying (definitions) with respect to competency as a concept (versus their resulting definitions), it became necessary to code for the presence of a preconceived, overarching or underlying definition of "competency" using their TERMINOLOGY (the presence or absence of these words).

This is an attempt to answer such questions as: How does the shaping of, and their resulting definition relate to the shape of the preconceived definition? Does use of this underlying terminology reflect a commonality of approach?

And this doesn't even get us to a third layer, that of MEANING. What does it all mean: how they've approached competency, how they have/have not expressed it, their multiple uses of a single word such as "skills" to reflect an element that is a subset of competency in some articles, treated as a synonym for competency in others and of equivalent importance with competency in yet more articles? Further, are there geographic differences (behavioural versus functional definitions) and how does it all fit within the overall framework for discussions of competency (as proposed by a business author)? etc. More work ahead. ick.