so what was niggling at me back in April?!!

Wow,

It has been that long! Dang. Well, I'm back considering the research stuff. What had been whispering in my ear back in my April post finally materialized. While I coded the discussion and definitions in the articles (the theory and "definitions" respectively) as one entity, I realized that I needed to code each separately or independently. I don't know why it took me so long to figure that out. In retrospect it is blatantly obvious.

I really needed to take a step back and investigate how the authors' have organized their thoughts and expressed constructs. I need to consider these as two independent conceptualizations of the concept of competency, because this is how the authors' are approaching the concept (what % is unclear at this time). By discussing competency and then defining competency within a single article, they are implicitly joining the two parts, but when they write about them, the text is sometimes (%?) independent of the definition (typically located in a table or figure, typically). The two conceptualizations, based on my impressions, contain minimal overlap in terminology used, and further, there is internal consistency within each conceptualization.

So the exciting slog begins again. I may even have to revisit my initial coding after this second approach/coding is completed. Why does this have to take so long?