d. Methodologies: Analysis of texts

Reading the entries in the Scenarios from the Sahel contest gives you an uncanny sense of stepping into the mind of a young person in Senegal, Mali or Burkina Faso, getting an insight into their experiences of sexuality, social and emotional life _ and, no less important, their preconceptions about them. There_s a real sense in which the scenarios provide the kind of information that most parents of teenage children would love to get their hands on _ not least because they help us to understand just where those young people are coming from.
The contest entries are privileged as a source of information largely because they are narratives, not academic-style essays. They are not instances of young people trying to demonstrate to adults what they know and what they think the grown-ups want to read. In the vast majority of cases, they truly are creative contributions.
The scenarios are unique as a source of information because they provide us with data that is situated. They also have the advantage over many data collection methods (surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, interviews_) of revealing not only what respondents know they know but what they didn_t know they knew, what they might not have been prepared to admit or been able to articulate in a non-situational way. The scenarios are a research tool that give us rich insights into young people_s understanding and attitudes, including their contradictions and inconsistencies.
If these are the things that make the scenarios fascinating, it is also what makes their analysis challenging.
Some of the things that the textual analysis of the scenarios allows us to do
Textual analysis of the scenarios reveals how much we can learn from the young people and their view of the world and the epidemic; about the logic underpinning the sense they make out of the information they receive and its relation to the reality they see and live. For example,

1. It allows us to understand young people_s perceptions of behavior in its social context.
2. It allows us to explore perceptions of social relationships and values.
3. It reveals a great deal about the language the young people use and how they are trying to pin down what they perceive in words, stories and images.
4. It allows us to understand the preconceptions the young participants have about specific situations. These are the preconceptions with which they will approach those situations if they encounter them in real life.

5. It reveals what information they have received (it is often possible to identify documents to which young people have referred).
6. It reveals how well they have assimilated the information they have received and how successful they are at applying that information to everyday situations.
7. It allows us to identify aspects of HIV/AIDS prevention which protagonists prioritize.
8. It allows us to generate lists of a range of attitudes that exist on a specific subject and the frequency with which they are encountered in the scenarios.
9. It gives us access to the solutions young people propose to certain problems or the arguments they mobilize in defense of their certain positions.
10. It can give a sense of what sort of individual the young people would choose as a role model.
11. Depending on your production schedule, it can inform the production of films.
12. It can highlight aspects of the epidemic which are likely to be difficult to understand for a large part of the population.
13. It can reveal inconsistencies between the young people_s perceptions and the health messages seen as appropriate for them.

How you undertake text analysis will depend on how you have shaped and structured your archive. Even with very limited resources and minimal archival structure, much can be accomplished and learned.
Whatever the scale of your analysis, its starting point must always be the formulation of the questions you would like to find answers to.
We feel that it is most appropriate for the analysis to be done in as participatory a manner as possible. A participatory methodology is appropriate for many reasons. It makes possible truly multidisciplinary research and increases the validity of the conclusions by diluting overly subjective perspectives. It takes advantage of local prevention workers_ in-depth cultural knowledge. It allows them to generate the research questions that have the greatest relevance to their own work and to apply the research findings immediately in the field. It can ensure continuity of involvement of many members of the project team, providing further capacity building.

The first step is to define the objectives for the research. Clearly, the primary objective is, by listening to the young people carefully, to make recommendations for improving the IEC resources on HIV/AIDS for young people. But this can _ and should _ take many forms.
Subjects of analysis:
C You might have asked jurors to make special requests for text analysis. You could place emphasis on fulfilling their requests and circulating the results swiftly.
C During the selection process, jurors formulate observations and recommendations based on the their own functional analysis of groups of scenarios. Their observations and recommendations pertain to young people_s level of knowledge, perspectives and concerns with regard to a particular topic, as well as the language they use when discussing the matter. You are now in a position to verify, through scientific analysis, what the jurors had to say, as well as to reach far deeper into the subject in question.

You might also want to send an input-seeking inquiry to the broader project team, as well as to other potentially interested individuals (including foreign-based researchers), with a view to introducing them to the archive and inviting them to suggest topics for text analysis.

C In addition to conducting text analysis on scenarios written on a given topic, it is possible to carry out analysis on contributions from a given area. This might be especially interesting to organizations keen to understand the impact of their activities in a particular village, for example. The results obtained from such analysis could help guide the organization as it goes about formulating strategies for future activities.

The choice of initial research themes might be dictated by immediate program needs. It will also depend on whether or not the scenarios have been coded or catalogued by keyword.
The most universal option is to select a theme that relates directly to one or more of the situations proposed in the list of suggestions, for example, parent-child dialogue (the first theme on the list of suggestions in the Scenarios from the Sahel contest). Alternatively, a research topic might cover several numbers on the list of suggestions. It should be relatively easy to locate the scenarios treating, say, condom negotiation within a couple, by reference to the list of suggestions, although this will be less easy for those that are among the _free choice_ scenarios.

Another option for small-scale research is to use a random sample of the scenarios and explore certain issues in greater depth. You could, for example, continue the work started by the selection jury by analyzing in great detail the misconceptions about HIV/AIDS present in the sample. In short, you don_t have to read and code every scenario before you can begin extremely useful analysis.
Remember to pre-test your selected methodology thoroughly.