Includes bibliographical references and index.

I sometimes think that conducting qualitative research is similar to exploring a forest for the first time. I start off on a clear path, but have only a vague idea of exactly where I am going. Paths lead off in many directions, many of which trail off into dead ends. Sometimes, I have to create my own paths, and often, I find myself trailing back to where I had been previously. This case study explains how I gradually found my way through a study about how self-injury is reported in the news. Self-injury occurs when someone deliberately hurts themselves--often by cutting or scraping--but without suicidal intent. Self-injury occurs in reality, but news coverage of self-injury is a selective "construction" of reality. As you will see, the path that I followed into this particular forest seemed straightforward at first, but became increasingly circular as I proceeded. Beginning with a theory and a model to guide me, I initially took a deductive approach which allowed me to describe what I found using frequency analysis as a method. As a researcher, however, I was unsatisfied with just description, so I turned to an inductive approach in my analysis, borrowing concepts from other scholars published research to better understand the meaning of the data that I had collected.

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