Looking at Family Literacy through a Kaleidoscope Metaphor

The application of metaphors in qualitative research is well–recognized for communicating messages succinctly and in powerful ways. A child's toy kaleidoscope has been selected as a metaphor for use in the present study. The origin of the word kaleidoscope is from three Greek words: kalos meaning beauty, eidos meaning form, and scope meaning image. According to the Kaleidoscope Photographic Workshop site (2003, ¶ 2), a kaleidoscope is "an optical instrument in which bits of glass, beads, etc. [are], held loosely at the end of a rotating tube [and] are shown in continually changing symmetrical forms by reflection in three mirrors placed at 60 degree angles to each other."

The kaleidoscope metaphor has been previously used in qualitative research as a template for the organization and analysis of data. Dye, Schatz, Rosenberg, and Coleman (2000), four doctoral candidates in a research class, provided an overview of the constant comparative method to analyze their data in their paper. They worked through the complex process of categorization, comparison, inductive analysis and refinement of their data bits into categories while making reference to the kaleidoscope metaphor. Dye et al (2000) indicate that the loose bits of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope represent their data, while the mirrors represent their categories, and the flat plates represent the overarching topic that inform their analysis. This metaphor helped them to conceptualize the process of ongoing category refinement.

In the same way, Diment (2001) saw merit in selecting the kaleidoscope metaphor when referring to a process of making sense of qualitative data. She talks about how the methods used for data analysis in grounded theory dissolve and change like a kaleidoscope:

Familiar as we are with the way that a kaleidoscopic image dissolves and changes in shape and form when the instrument is fractionally revolved, it can nevertheless be a disconcerting experience to discover that both the data and the methods you are using to analyse it are also dissolving and changing. The difficulty is to hold the shape steady enough for a composite picture to emerge and my specific difficulty with applying the tenets of grounded theory to the data analysis meant that I could no longer see the data as fixedly as I believed I needed to in order to arrive at a 'definitive' analysis. (pp. 8-9)