When I asked what they meant by this “loss of balance,” the mainteacher leaned forward and said quite directly, “nowadays in China, men aren’tlike men, and women aren’t like women.”
This so shocking. It’s such a blunt and outdated way of talking about gender, and it shows how anxious these teachers are about social change. Instead of adapting, they try to force people back into old categories that probably never even existed the way they imagine.
Afer painting this grim picture, they declared thatthe China that I was visiting, the China outside of those heavy doors that theyhad just eagerly denounced, was not in fact “the real China.”2 Te real China, aland of rites and etiquette (liyi zhi bang), and a global exemplar of morality andharmony, was based in the “Great Way” (da dao) that extended from the begin-ning of time to modernity.3 But this Great Way had been lost decades ago, andhad been replaced by an inferior way (xiao dao), in which people were solely con-cerned with convenience, ease, speed, money, and their own selfsh interests. Now,
This statement feels kind of wild, it’s like the teachers honestly believe they’re the ones preserving the “real” China. It shows how nostalgia can turn into a comforting fantasy people use to avoid facing how much the world has changed. It also makes me feel like the academy isn’t just teaching manners at all, it’s creating its own little imagined universe.
Rather, as you code you will findyourself going back and forth between steps. As you become more andmore familiar with the data, you will realize, for example, that a repeatingidea that you originally coded as reflecting one theme, actually makes moresense grouped with the repeating ideas under a different theme. Or youmight decide that two separate themes could be collapsed into a third,more comprehensive theme. Thus, the process of coding is complex andrequires patience.
This feels pretty honest. Coding always feels messy and sometimes I assume I must be doing it wrong. Hearing that even experts jump between steps makes the whole process feel more human and more like thinking than following instructions.
If you are truly interested in the subjective experience of the participants, it is their concerns rather than the researchers’ thatmust take center stage.
I think this is an important reminder. It’s easy to enter an interview trying to confirm our own theories, but that defeats the purpose of qualitative research. I like how this sentence forces humility, that you're not the expert in someone else's experience.
If your interpretation issupported by the data, then it is valid, even if there are other ways to interpret the same data.
I think this really reduces the pressure. I like the idea that qualitative work isn’t about finding “the truth” but about building a reasonable interpretation. It makes the research feel more flexible, instead of something you can fail at by choosing the "wrong" idea.