4.1　Data Processing

After selecting ten cases to be used in this study, I started to transcribe the recordings word by word.The recordings are in two dialects of Chinese language.Both belong to the northern dialect family in the Chinese language, which the Mandarin derived from.Therefore, I had no problem understanding the dialects while transcribing because the official language of China is mandarin and I am completely fluent in Mandarin.When problems of ambiguity and the like arose, I turned to native speakers to clarify sentences.The lengths of the recordings vary from half an hour to over three hours.All the excerpts of transcripts in my analysis of this book are in English, while I did my original analysis using the Chinese transcripts.

I used Chinese transcripts instead of their English translation while conducting the analysis on them.The reason is that because translation, however accurate it is, always loses some “flavor”of the source text.By using transcripts in the original language,identification and disambiguation of meaning, intention, nuance,style and phonetic features will remain relatively intact.(https://www.daowen.com)

There are several steps involved in the analysis.The first phase include transcribing and reading through the transcripts while listening to the corresponding recordings.In this way, I marked down the significant hesitations, changes in pitches and tones, pauses, overlaps of turns, and emphasis of specific words in the speech.It also made salient important features of the mediation, including what the case was about, who the parties involved were, and the circumstances under which the mediation occurred.I tried to recall the mediation sessions that I was part of with help of the transcripts and the notes I made while collecting data, then I wrote summaries for each case and mediation session as are presented in the last section.The second phase involved a more careful reading and notation of features of the mediation related to the research questions.While there are certain guidelines for doing this, intuition and experience inform this interpretive process.These interesting features include sequential organization of discourse, potential techniques that mediators use to persuade the disputant(s), to construct the stages of mediation, and to define the roles of the participants,word usage that is significant in constructing the socio-cultural context, repeated usage of certain linguistic structures, as well as some rhetorical devices, such as metaphor.In doing this, I found techniques that are used in more than one case and techniques that seem uncommon to American mediators (e.g.the technique of education).I also found some structural or procedural commonality among different sessions.The next step involves the selection of interesting linguistic or discourse features that amount to mediation techniques.These features need to be distinct enough to be identified and presented.Excerpts were adapted to help explain the points.The excerpts chosen need to demonstrate that the feature is recognizable and meaningful.Not only the participants of the conversation understand the meaning conveyed, but also the ordinary readers of the transcripts accept the feature as meaningful usage of language.The last stage involves categorizing these techniques.Three categories are generated depending on whether the mediator has a strong agenda or the intention to persuade or not.In the process of categorizing these interesting features and techniques, power distribution and the role of neutrality are demonstrated and elaborated.

The method presumes that features found are general unless counter evidence is found.Being general does not mean that the feature has to appear in the transcript frequently but it should be categorical, that is, different enough to be recognized as a category.Being normal and interpretable is the evidence that people expect it to happen, and when it does happen, people know what is going on.The analysis is diagnostic rather than generalizing in the ordinary sense.It does not have to happen in all the cases but it does happen often enough that the participants are not surprised by it.Therefore, the author’s intuition, knowledge of mediation and analysis, and the participants’ acceptance of the language feature are the two most important justifications that the feature happens and is worth studying.