![]() You will also want to ensure that you have procedures in place to protect the confidentiality of your interviewees and informants. Losing data because of poor filing systems or mislabeling is something you want to avoid. Finding a helpful way to store your material can take a lot of time, and you need to be smart about this from the very beginning. It might mean acquiring computer-assisted qualitative data-analysis software ( CAQDAS) and uploading all transcripts, fieldnotes, and digital files to its storage repository for eventual coding and analysis. This might mean creating a special password-protected Dropbox folder for storing your digital files. The first phase involves data organization. We can consider seven phases of data analysis, each of which is important for moving your voluminous data into “findings” that can be reported to others. by Mary Cullen on Unsplash Qualitative Data Analysis as a Long Process!Īlthough most of this and the following chapter will focus on coding, it is important to understand that coding is just one (very important) aspect of the long data-analysis process. Most of us find this permissible (but watch out for the methodological purists that exist among us). But know that there are many excellent qualitative researchers that use what works for any given study, who take what they can from each tradition. As you become more of an expert yourself, you may want to read more deeply about the tradition that speaks to your research. For these researchers, having very clear hypotheses and clearly defined “variables” before beginning analysis is standard practice, whereas the same would be expressly forbidden by those researchers, like grounded theorists, taking a more emergent approach.Īll that said, there are some helpful techniques to get you started, and these will be presented in this and the following chapter. Qualitative content analysis (QCA) often includes elements of counting (see chapter 17). And then there are some researchers who seek to account for the qualitative data using almost quantitative methods of analysis, perhaps counting and comparing the uses of certain narrative frames in media accounts of a phenomenon. They are less interested in generating theory and more interested in getting the picture right, valuing verisimilitude in the presentation. ![]() Ethnographers, in contrast, are more focused on creating a rich description of the practices, behaviors, and beliefs that operate in a particular field. Grounded Theory, for example, uses in vivo coding to generate new theoretical insights that emerge from a rigorous but open approach to data analysis. To complicate matters further, each approach (e.g., Grounded Theory, deep ethnography, phenomenology) has its own language and bag of tricks (techniques) when it comes to analysis. At times, the researcher may feel like an eccentric and tormented artist not to worry, this is normal” ( Marshall and Rossman 2016:214 ). It does not proceed in a linear fashion: it is not neat. How do you make sense of it? Students often want very clear guidelines here, and although I try to accommodate them as much as possible, in the end, analyzing qualitative data is a bit more of an art than a science: “The process of bringing order, structure, and interpretation to a mass of collected data is messy, ambiguous, time-consuming, creative, and fascinating. Qualitative data can be absolutely overwhelming-it may mean hundreds if not thousands of pages of interview transcripts, or fieldnotes, or retrieved documents. ![]() To those who have not yet conducted a qualitative study, the sheer amount of collected data will be a surprise. This chapter introduces you to the process of qualitative data analysis and the basic concept of coding, while the following chapter (chapter 19) will take you further into the various kinds of codes and how to use them effectively. Coding is the iterative process of assigning meaning to the data you have collected in order to both simplify and identify patterns. What do you do with all this data? How can you use it to answer your original research question (e.g., “How do political polarization and party membership affect local politics?”)? Before you can make sense of your data, you will have to organize and simplify it in a way that allows you to access it more deeply and thoroughly. ![]() You also have transcripts of interviews you have conducted with the mayor and city council members. Piled before you lie hundreds of pages of fieldnotes you have taken, observations you’ve made while volunteering at city hall.
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