Week 5 Qualitative analysis Flashcards
Types of Data (Sources)
Written notes from observations/interviews
Audio recordings
Video recordings
Diary recordings
Written answers to questionnaires
Artifacts, photos
Gives Us Insight to
Thoughts, views
Priorities, importance
Processes, practices
Intended effects of actions
Feelings and experiences
Why Analysis is Subjective
Influenced by opinion, creativity of
experimenter
Need to understand your biases and how
it might affect results
Maintain willingness to be surprised –
what’s going on here?
Respect the data and represent it as
honestly as possible
Simple Qualitative Analysis. Steps/Process
Identify recurring patterns or themes
* Emergent from the data
Categorize data
* Might be emergent or pre-specified
Looking for critical incidents
* Focus on key events
Tools Used for Qualitative Analysis
Specialized software
Automatic transcription
Manual transcription
Do You Need to Transcribe Everything?
- Broad exploratory analysis – yes
- Targeted analysis for specific topics – not always
- Sometimes detailed summary/notes can be enough
Thematic Analysis
Identify patterns or themes in the data
Can be inductive
* Themes emerge, no preconceived plan
Can be deductive
* Themes pre-planned, know ahead of
time what you’re interested in
Iterative process
Steps in Thematic Analysis
Familiarize yourself with your data.
Assign preliminary codes to your data in
order to describe the content.
Search for patterns or themes in your codes
Review themes
Define and name themes.
Produce your report
Thematic Analysis: Coding
A brief description of some part of the
data/transcript/excerpt
Can have multiple codes per excerpt
Granularity/focus depends on your
purpose
Will need multiple iterations and
refinement
Group into Themes
Organizing/clustering your
codes
Start to interpret for meaning
Draw diagrams/maps, organize
sticky notes to help visualize
Re-read transcripts/data to see
if anything else fits
Grounded Theory
Data collection and analysis integrated into an
iterative process
Evolves as you go through the process
Goal is to produce a theory based on the data
Focus on relationships between the
themes/data
Steps for Grounded Theory
Start collecting data
Start coding process
* Open coding: identify codes
* Axial coding: categorize/organize codes into themes
* Selective coding: find relationships between categories
Theory building
* Might start process, realize you need more data about
something, collect more, do more analysis… get more
data to confirm things…
Open Coding
Finding the codes
Axial Coding
Concepts are categorized/organized
Might use affinity diagrams
When misunderstandings/confusion
occur, go back to data
Affinity Diagrams
- One idea per sticky note
- Place notes on a large wall/surface
- Take one note as the starting point
- Take next note and ask, “is this similar or different?”
- Then either place in an existing group or start a new group
- Continue until all notes are clustered
- May re-arrange as needed
- Label your groups later
- Identify most important groups
- Start to identify relationships between groups
