Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Read Online Free Page B

manner in which she or he has been organizing and interpreting the data.
    Grounded theory is not as alien to the literary critic as it may first seem. In a sense, grounded theory is literary criticism (or, more precisely, a mix of New Criticism and structuralism) writ large. This approach has its roots in the humanities and, like New Criticism, concerns itself with close, repeated readings of the “data” (the term for the prose passages to be examined here) in order to uncover one or more core ideas, or concepts. Like structuralism, grounded theory then seeks to uncover larger, unifying patterns (or emerging themes) that show how the separate narratives under examination collectively make sense of the problem or situation being discussed.
    Sampling, Coding, and Grouping the Data
    To read, code, and group well over two thousand items—even if each item averages only one to three paragraphs in length—is a daunting task. Thus, a sample of the most recent postings to the Question & Answer section at eNotes.com on Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird has been retrieved and carefully examined in this study. The sampling process used here can be characterized as systematic and non-purposeful. The sampling is systematic in that two postings—the top posting and the bottom posting—have been retrieved from every “page” (with each page containing fifty postings) of the first thirty pages in the Question & Answer section, beginning with the most recent posting (dated December 2, 2009) and working backward to the earliest posting in the sample (dated August 30, 2008). The sampling is non-purposeful in that samples have not been selected or rejected on the basis of criteria such as the length of the answer, the relative success of the answer in replying to the initial question, or the rating of the answer by readers of the thread. This method of systematic, non-purposeful sampling has been used to preserve a high level of generalizability; in other words, any general statements growing out of this study of the sampled answers should hold true of all of the Question & Answer postings on Lee’s novel at eNotes.com from the last year or so.
    Each of the retrieved postings consists of one question, usually asked by a student, and one or more answers, usually posted by a teacher or a number of teachers. The purpose of this study is not to explore how well the teachers have answered the students’ questions but rather to explore what the teachers have had to say to students when asked about the novel. Thus, the questions have been removed from the working sample. (It bears noting, however, that the questions themselves, taken as a whole, read very much like homework assignments given out by teachers to their students. A number of questions end in tell-tale phrases such as “Justify your answer” or in statements that sound even more specific to a particular classroom setting, such as “Make reference to the use [or avoidance] of the poetic elements covered in the unit.” If many of the questions themselves have indeed been written by teachers for students, the Question & Answer section at eNotes.com may be seen as a particularly trustworthy source of data for this line of inquiry, as an echo chamber of sorts for teachers’ thoughts and statements about Lee’s novel.) Also deleted from the working sample are all individual answers that have not been written by self-identified teachers at the level of the middle school, high school, and first-year college classroom. The initial retrieved sample of ninety-three answers (in sixty postings) has thus been reduced to a working sample of seventy answers. The seventy answers making up the working sample have then been coded, compared, and grouped by emerging themes.
    Even when using a simplified method of coding rather than a highly complex one, researchers find coding to be a time-consuming process. 2 Each item of data (in this case,