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Qualitative Models: Visually Representing Complex Data in an Image/Text Balance

The Socrates Institute

Although traditional narration that depicts relationships and cultures studied by social scientists will always be essential to qualitative research, another valuable mode of analyzing data and presenting findings is also available. "Qualitative models" simulta neously represent coexisting realities and illustrate multiple layers of meaning. Models may be either metaphoric (i.e., connotative, mcludmg metonymy) or denotative, and the mode of representation may be either iconic (based on resemblance) or symbolic (based on conventional signification). The models provide a qualitatively different grasp of phenomena by stimulating a wider variety of neural processes through spatial arrangement, color, shape, and figures. This examination of four qualitative models from a school ethnography demonstrates the complementarity of such nonlinguistic and linguistic interpretations. In this sense, qualitative models are visual representations that lead reader and researcher to construct a qualitatively different understanding from "an image/text balance" wherein the two mutually define and support one another.

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