how do we analyse qualitative data?

well there are a lot of different approaches there's no one right way to do it seven bade in a
major would describe it as breaking data into meaningful parts or you might describe as
making sense of the data or a systematic search for meaning and it doesn't really matter
what the data is it might be semi structured interviews focus groups Diaries documents the
basic process is going to be the same for all of them and it's this read your data and read it
again and again and again and again analysis of qualitative data comes down to reading it in
very close detail familiarize yourself with every nuance of the data and all the different
methods of analyzing qualitative data are really different ways of reading the data in
different lights and with a different focus in some ways the analysis of qualitative data is a
lot like writing a book report you would summarize the plot you would describe the
characters what they do and their main motivations and then you talk about some of the
themes and the subtext which exists in the book the report that you write about the book is
going to be shorter than the book itself but it's going to give whoever reads that report an
idea about what's in the book what's happening and the most important things going on in it
so let's imagine that we are writing a high school book report let's imagine that we're reading
of mice and men John Steinbeck's classic 1937 novel something that a lot of you've
probably done a book report for back in the day now the first time you read it through you
might not get all the different themes in it so you might pick up some obvious things rabbits
poverty farming how we treat disabled people but then with later readings you might start to
pick up more subtle things so you might want to talk about the concept of the American
dream or friendship or guilt and remorse and just like when we're analyzing a book the
challenge with qualitative data is not the volume it's the depth of the data now if Mice and
Men is only a hundred and seven pages long it's a very short book but there's a lot going on
in there and that's what you'll find about most qualitative data it talks about very detailed
very difficult topics where there's a lot of going on a lot of context a lot of subtext a lot of
people's different life stories and experiences to try and explain and describe and qualitative
data is also more complex than a novel because unstructured data and this means that it's a
lot more random nobody's trying to create patterns out of it it may not follow a particular
structure so it's very difficult to find what you need from the data and you'll also very
quickly find that even if you're just doing a couple of semi structured interviews or just a
few focus groups the transcripts of that will result in probably hundreds of thousands of
words something like a masters or PhD thesis worth of words to describe and analyze and
understand and so analyzing qualitative data is a lot about that interrogating the data
summarizing it and then pulling connections across it and the aim is to get your data to
answer your research questions whatever they might be for your project so what does the
data say and what are the participants in your project say about the research question a
pretty typical approach for qualitative data analysis would be to read the data compare the
data and then interpret the data so that's the basic kind of three step approach that we're
going to look at here the first stage is reading and familiarization and this is to start the
process of thinking about what's going on in the data by really almost literally knowing it
backward so we read the data we ask ourselves if we think we understand everything in it
and if not we go back and read it again or we read it in a different way looking for
something more different in the data and we go back and we read it again and again and it's
often an iterative and cyclical process until we feel that we understand the data when we can
say that we understand the data then we can go and start writing up our findings and writing
up the report so a variety of different ways in which we can read the data the most basic is
what's often called content and nurses so it's kind of literally what people are saying what
they're talking about what is in the data there's also a somatic analysis so what are the
themes or topics what are people what kinds of thing of people talking about in the data and
then there's things like discourse analysis and that's looking at how people say things what
kind of words are language people use so these are all different ways of looking the data
reading it in a slightly different light that might bring different things to the fore and that's
important because in the qualitative data we're not just looking for what people say but we're
looking for what's not said what are people not talking about what subtleties are there what
subtext is there and these are all the things that we need to pull out from her analysis one of
the ways that can help us read data is to start to structure it using quotes so to find sections
of text which are about something interesting and then tagging or labeling categorizing or
coding them in some way and this is sometimes called coding of qualitative data you don't
have to do coding but it's a very useful tool to help you find quotes which will support your
arguments and answer your research questions later on and you can do this just by looking
for the interesting sections you can do approaches like line by line IPA or in vivo coding
where you're looking at very specific ways of summarizing and looking exactly what's being
said but regardless it's the same kind of process now the second stage with analysis after
reading and familiarization is comparison and this is where we're looking to see what's
different about the data and that might be what's different across different people across
different periods of time across different categories or events what things are the same and
what things are different and why trying to understand that and then the third stage will be
interpretation and for a lot of authors this is something which is a very distinct separate
stage different part of analysis and interpretation is about what does the data mean and it's
almost a process of going back and analyzing the analysis looking at the coding the
summaries your notes and to try and explain the story that's in the data where you could say
that analysis involves uncovering patterns in data an interpretation involves undercovering
meaning messy multiple meanings in the data and one of the things that we're doing at this
stage is to try and test our hypothesis so we've got a research question and we've got an idea
in our head about what's going on and that's our hypothesis and that stage we're still trying
to create new hypotheses so we're trying to say does this data match what we think is going
on can that support the way that we're interpreting the data and one of the things that you'll
do doing the interpretation stage is actually probably go through and look at your codes if
you're doing coding and finding which codes are important which ones have meaning and
even coding those codes so creating higher-level themes and other ways of looking to see
which of the interesting things in the data you can kind of consider this an idea of breaking
something down to blocks so the codes are the very basic building blocks and then building
them back up to build a more complex picture of what's going on now there is software
which you can use to help the process you can use something like Excel or word most
people would just use paper highlighters notes they write on their transcripts annotating to
help them remember things as they read through the text the software packages can help you
do this in a slightly more nuanced way because they can keep track of your codes and
themes but they don't do any of the analysis yourself you still have to read and understand
the data in fact I would describe those software tools as tools that help you read the data in
different ways and then keep track of the notes and comments and observations you've
made while reading the data so that when you come to writing up you can quickly find the
bits of data which are interesting relevant to you and you can back up what you're trying to
say so we've got some other videos which can help so if you want to look at coding there's a
video here on coding data and if you want to understand what qualitative software can do
there's another video here which will take you through some of the basics of using
qualitative analysis software so one of the software packages is Quercus is designed to be
very easy to use it's designed to at all stages help you go back to the text and read it so to try
and keep you very close to the data and help you with that familiarization process we make
it very visual and very intuitive it's really fun to kind of play with and explore with your
qualitative text data there's a free trial that you can download and a lot more video tutorials
which will show you the ropes about importing your data working with your data and how
to do that analysis in the software so it was a very brief introduction to analysis of
qualitative data there are many more specific techniques which you can use and you'll read a
lot more about those in the links below or on some of the other video tutorials we have don't
forget you can also download a free trial of quark costs from the link below and see how
that can help you analyze and interpret your qualitative data you