Qualitative analysis Flashcards
What is qualitative analysis?
Trying to understand the meaning and feeling of data (not generalising/ reducing) - teasing apart insights in the data in particular ways
- Aims to understand ‘what it is like’ to experience particular conditions and how people manage situations
- Quality of experience rather than identification of cause-effect relationships
What are six methods of qualitative analysis?
Content analysis
Thematic analysis
Discourse analysis
Conversation analysis
Inductive thematic analysis
Grounded theory
How do researchers make sure that quantitative methods do not miss nuance?
Quantitative methods alone can miss nuance and complexity, so the researcher contributes to the knowledge that is uncovered
What are four methods of obtaining qualitative data?
- Surveys
- Recordings
- Interviews
- Chatrooms
What is the point of qualitative reasoning?
- To identify meaning in individual responses
- To summarise complexity
- To generate new hypotheses
- To produce themes or categories that can be used to:
- Connect with other research
- Go into a mixed methods analysis (use with quantitative methods)
What is content analysis?
A research method for the subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the classification, coding and identifying themes or patterns
What are the three kinds of content analysis?
Conventional
Directed
Summative
What is conventional content analysis?
Coder does not start with pre-conceived categories, they use open-ended data collection
What is directed content analysis?
Coder has some prior categories in mind
What is summative content analysis?
How much are certain terms used or implied? (Similar to linguistics)
What is thematic analysis?
A method for identifying, analysing and reporting patterns (themes) within data. It minimally organises and describes your data set in rich detail.
- No specific theoretical commitment
- Generating themes across participants
- Themes don’t emerge - we identify them
- Themes are usually more complex than just categories
What is the difference between content analysis and thematic analysis?
Content analysis focuses on the systematic classification of data using coding to identify key categories within it.
Thematic analysis focuses on the search and generation of themes from the dataset.
In thematic analysis themes don’t emerge - coders identify them and themes are usually more complex than just categories, whereas content analysis uses less complex categories.
What is an example of a thematic analysis theme?
E.g. Interviews on disability: Adapting to change vs Feeling like a ghost: loss of identity and social status
How was quantitative analysis conducted by Woods et al (2015) and how did they achieve inter-rater reliability?
Whole team: read samples and discussed potential themes (2-3 meetings)
Then 2 raters: read whole dataset, developed coding frame (about 50 codes and themes), and applied these codes independently to 20% of the data first, then split the remaining
What is inter-rater reliability in qualitative analysis?
Checking whether different raters pick the same codes and use them in the same way
