QQM Topic 4

• What Is Distinctive About Qualitative Data Analysis?

  • Focused on texts
  • Hermeneutic perspective
  • Qualitative research has emic focus (representing a setting with the participant’s terms); quantitative research has etic focus (representing a setting with the researcher’s terms)
  • Iterative process of progressive focusing
• Five steps of qualitative data analysis

  1. Documentation of data and data collection
  2. Conceptualization and coding
  3. Examining relationships
  4. Authenticating conclusions
  5. Reflexivity
• Documentation

  • Analysis begins with jottings, field notes, transcripts and so on.
  • Essential for keeping track.
  • Provides a way of developing an outline for analytic process.
  • Encourages ongoing conceptualizing.
• Conceptualization, Coding, and Categorizing

  • May begin with simple observation.
  • Analytic insights tested against new observations and modified.
  • Facilitated by a matrix or chart.
• Coding

  The process of naming or labelling the data, categories, and properties (words, phrases, meaning units, repeated in the data)
• Examining Relationships and Displaying Data

  Centrepiece of analytic process.

  Move from description to explanation.

  Can also be diagrammed in chart or matrix.

  Simple relationships can be extended into more complex causal model.
• Authenticating conclusions

  • How credible was the informant? Were statements made by someone with whom the researcher had a relationship of trust, or by someone the researcher had just met? Did the informant have a reason to lie?
  • Were the statements made in response to the researcher's questions, or were they spontaneous?
  • How does the presence of the researcher or the researcher's informant influence the actions and statements of other group members?
• Reflexivity

  • Confidence in conclusions strengthened by account of how researcher interacted with subjects.
  • Sensitivity to influences on interpretations of social situation or process
• Some alternatives in Qualitative Data Analysis

  • Grounded Theory
  • Narrative Analysis
  • Conversation Analysis
  • Visual Sociology
• Grounded Theory

  Systematic theory developed inductively, based on observations that are summarized into conceptual categories, reevaluated in the research setting, and gradually refined and linked to other conceptual categories.

  • Steps of grounded theory:
  • Summarize observations into conceptual categories
  • Test categories directly in research setting
  • Refine theory again
  • Finally, attempt to discover negative evidence
• Narrative Analysis

  Focuses on how respondents impose order on the flow of experience in their lives and so make sense of events and actions in which they have participated.

  • Coding for narrative analysis…
  • Typically of narratives as a whole than of different elements
  • Revolves around reading stories and classifying them into general patterns
• Conversation Analysis

  • Method for analysing ordinary conversation.
  • Three premises:
  • Interactions sequentially organized, and talk can be analysed by process of social interaction.
  • Talk is contextually oriented.
  • No interactive details are irrelevant to understanding social interaction.
• Visual Sociology

  • The social world is “observed” and interpreted through photographs, films and other images.
  • A method for. . .
  • Learning how others “see” the social world
  • Creating images of that world for further study
  • Video recording increasingly popular
  • Video ethnography