1.4.8 Methods of Interim and Final Analysis

Miles and Huberman criticised procedures of qualitative data analysis for their obscurity about how analysis was achieved. To meet this shortcoming, they view analysis as three concurrent flows of activity that deserve separate documentation, data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing (Miles and Huberman 1984: 20-23).

Already during the first field trip in 1995, the fourfold typology emerged. It appeared as a very early, yet also considerably fruitful data reduction of obvious inherent structures and boundary constructions that derived from different cultures. The typology answered in shortest terms on the initial question „how the movement looks like”. Intuition supplied the idea for the typology in an instant. Sequentially reconstructing its logical emergence from collected data was easy. Also, the typology is a highly concentrated data display. As I applied it immediately in 1995, and systematically during the two following field trips in 1996 and 1997, the typology served data reduction already during data collection (Miles and Huberman 1984: 36-48). Since I felt already familiar with the various ecclesiastical appearances, the typology consequently guided my attention towards the more unfamiliar synagogal expression.

Listening often to the interviews recorded in the field became an important method at home. Due to my insufficient perception of situations in the field, sometimes it downed to me only slowly what respondents really had said. By repeated listening to interviews of different people, I started seeing and understanding connections and patterns. Interviews that I regarded first as failures revealed interesting information, after I had learned to listen and to hear. Visual impressions of situations and nonverbal expressions occasionally stood again vividly before my eyes, suggesting meanings and conclusions. Sometimes I looked up photographs that I shot or got, to consider physical settings and artefacts. Since others can study the available Messianic Jewish literature as well, analysing the collected empirical data may be my particular contribution to a description of the movement.

As Miles and Huberman said it so nicely,

writing, in short, does not come after analysis; it is analysis, happening as the writer thinks through the meaning of data in the display. Writing is thinking, not the report of thought (Miles and Huberman 1984: 91).

Nevertheless, as writing serves both, one can say, it is also both, reporting and thinking. To draw conclusions from collected data requires sorting them, deciding what they mean. One needs to decide whether they refer to isolated incidents or patterns, to explain them, to consider possible outlines, causes and results. After closing data collection in the field in 1997, data reduction and display continued by sorting interviews, observations and documents according to the fourfold typology. For each type, the modified framework to study religion served further to extract and bundle data. Per type, I bundled statements of interviews and field notes and displayed them as narrative text (Miles and Huberman 1984: 66-67). This allowed to compare the descriptions of the four types. I looked for similarities and differences regarding the physical arrangements, the cultural, or supernatural, the internal and external social-structural, the relationship between and among specialists and laity, and the modes of religious construction. The fourfold typology endured this process and became well-tried.

After I was satisfied, or saturated (Hutjes and Van Buuren 1992), with perceiving the four types and describing them, I revisited theories of organizational and religious anthropology. I looked up and read again articles and books that I tried to relate to what I had found. A blend of contingency, network and movement theory (Mintzberg 1983: 283-297, Martin 1992: 83-117, Pröpper 1993: 295-342, Koopmans and Duyvendak 1992: 11-38, Klandermans 1996: 95-112. Parekh 1997: 16-28) seemed able to illuminate parts of the movement's organizational structures. The dilemma of its internal cultural and social-structural fragmentation, ecclesiastical Christian versus synagogal Jewish, became better perceivable, by relating it to Turner's considerations about liminality in transition rituals (Turner 1967). The Jewish-Orthodox hostility became more understandable in the light of purity as M. Douglas described it (M. Douglas 1976).

After having now layed out carefully premisses that underlaid and theories that guided my study and analysis of the current Israeli Messianic Jewish movement, I can begin to present my findings in the subsequent chapters. In the next chapter, part two, I will subsequently describe the different groups following the fourfold typology and the modified framework for the study of religion. I will explicate on the distinctions between ecclesiastical and synagogal characteristics and non-charismatic and charismatic characteristics. For each of the four types I will first describe its physical arrangements and their place in the Interaction with the Supernatural, and in internal and external interaction. After the description of the four types I will close this essay by attempting in part three to interpret my findings in the light of organizational theory and religious anthropology. After the sometimes maybe even steep ascent to the plateau, the tableland invites the traveller to explore it accordingly.