Now that we have completed the interviews and the body scans, we are in the process of analysing the data, and there is much to analyse. The first thing to do is to examine the questionnaires to pull out some of the descriptive statistics. From there we will go on to compare the questionnaire data with the interview data. We are aware that there are some discrepancies with what the dancers write down in the questionnaire and what they say during th interview and the mapping process. Thus far, we have examined the transcripts of 100 dancers in relation to four of the questions in the interview schedule:
- How do you define injury?
- How do you know when you are injured?
- When does pain become an injury?
- Have you ever danced when you were injured or in pain?
Although this is a qualitative project, it is remarkable how consistent the answers are to the above questions in the transcripts we have examined. Although the responses to the first three questions fall in to certain patterns, the uniformity of the responses to the last question is very striking. All but four dancers from the 100 transcripts we examined indicated that they have danced while they were in pain or injured. Of the four who said they have not been injured, two indicated that they would dance when injured if it were necessary. The reasons given for dancing in pain or injury were also consistent. If the next 100 dancers we have interviewed have respond in a very different way, then the blanket uniform responses of the initial data analysis would be called in to question and would have to be amended accordingly. We already know from the questionnaire that over 20 dancers said they had never been injured, although we have yet to check if this tallies with the interview data.
We have been looking at the elements of the questionnaire data and have been rather surprised to find that 24 per cent of dancers in the survey indicated that they are under the care of a GP. However, this figure does not seem to square with the interview transcripts we have so far examined, where a number of dancers indicated that the simply would not go to a GP if they were injured. We are hoping that the dancers will be able to throw some light on this contradictiory message which seems to be coming out of different parts of the process?