The Data and the Source of Data Research Instruments

six steps namely organizing and preparing the data, reading the whole data, coding the data, sorting the data, interrelating description, and interpreting the meaning of description. Below is the description of those six steps. 1. First, the researcher identified the data which were taken from the novel by making some notes. 2. Second, the researcher read and re-read the whole data and arranging them into two major topics under the study. The first analysis was gender discrimination and the second analysis was the attitudes of women towards the discrimination. 3. Third, the researcher categorized the data into thematic categories related to gender discrimination and the attitudes of women towards the discrimination. 4. Fourth, the researcher sorted the data to get the more relevant data. Thus, the irrelevant data were excluded. 5. Fifth, the data analysis process moved towards the process of making interrelation between the description of the data and the theories to get findings based on the objectives of the research: to reveal what kinds of gender discrimination and women‟s attitudes towards it in Hosseini‟s A Thousand Splendid Suns. 6. Sixth, the researcher engaged in making interpretation of the findings based on her comprehension about the theories which were used.

F. The Trustworthiness of the Data

According to given and Saumure 2008:895 in qualitative research trustworthiness has become an important concept because it allows the researcher to describe the virtues of qualitative terms outside of the parameters that are typically applied in quantitative research. In essence, trustworthiness can be thought of as the ways in which qualitative researchers ensure that transferability, dependability, confirmability and credibility are evident in their research. Transferability refers to the applicability of the research to the different contexts broad or narrow. In this way, a study is not deemed unworthy if it cannot be applied to broa der contexts; instead, a study‟s worthiness is determined by how well others can determine to which alternative contexts the findings might be applied. To prove the transferability, the researcher provided the rich, thick description to enable the readers to transfer information to other settings and to determine whether the findings can be transferred because of shared characteristics. Confirmability deals with the accuracy of the researcher in conceptualizing the study. The interpretations and findings of a study should match the data. Meanwhile, dependability refers to the idea that if the other researchers collect data in similar conditions, a similar explanation for the phenomenon should be found. Both conformability and dependability in this study was achieved by reading the data comprehensively and rechecking it carefully. Credibility is a concept of internal validity of the findings. A credible study is one where the researchers have accurately and richly described the phenomenon