Data processing in qualitative studies

How you process and analyse data in a qualitative study depends upon how you plan to com­municate the findings. Broadly, there are three ways in which you can write about your find­ings in qualitative research: (1) developing a narrative to describe a situation, episode, event or instance; (2) identifying the main themes that emerge from your field notes or transcription of your in-depth interviews and writing about them, quoting extensively in verbatim format; and (3) in addition to (2) above, also quantify the main themes in order to provide their preva­lence and thus significance.

Editing, as understood for quantitative studies, is inappropriate for qualitative research. However, it is possible that you may be able to go through your notes to identify if something does not make sense. In such an event, you may be able to recall the context and correct the contents, but be careful in doing so as inability to recall precisely may introduce inaccuracies (recall error) in your description. Another way of ensuring whether you are truly reflecting the situation is to transcribe the interviews or observational notes and share them with the respondents or research participants for confirmation and approval. Validation of the informa­tion by a respondent is an important aspect of ensuring the accuracy of data collected through unstructured interviews.

For writing in a narrative format there is no analysis per se, however, you need to think through the sequence in which you need or want to narrate. For the other two ways of writ­ing about the findings, you need to go through content analysis, as mentioned earlier. Content analysis means analysing the contents of interviews or observational field notes in order to identify the main themes that emerge from the responses given by your respondents or the observation notes made by you. This process involves a number of steps:

Step 1 Identify the main themes. You need to go carefully through descriptive responses given by your respondents to each question in order to understand the meaning they commu­nicate. From these responses you develop broad themes that reflect these meanings. You will notice that people use different words and language to express themselves. it is important for you to select the wording of your themes in a way that accurately repre­sents the meaning of the responses categorised under a theme. These themes become the basis for analysing the text of unstructured interviews. similarly, you need to go through your field notes to identify the main themes.

Step 2 Assign codes to the main themes. Whether or not you assign a code to a main theme is dependent upon whether or not you want to count the number of times a theme has occurred in an interview. if you decide to count these themes you should, at random, select a few responses to an open-ended question or from your observational or discus­sion notes and identify the main themes. You continue to identify these themes from the same question till you have reached saturation point. Write these themes and assign a code to each of them, using numbers or keywords, otherwise just identify the main themes.

step 3 Classify responses under the main themes. Having identified the themes, the next step is to go through the transcripts of all your interviews or your notes and classify the responses or contents of the notes under the different themes. You can also use a computer program such as ethnograph, NuD*isT N6, NVivo, Xsight for undertaking this thematic analysis. You will benefit by learning one of these programs if your data is suit­able for such analysis.

step 4 Integrate themes and responses into the text of your report. Having identified responses that fall within different themes, the next step is to integrate them into the text of your report. How you integrate them into your report is mainly your choice. some people, while discussing the main themes that emerged from their study, use verbatim responses to keep the ‘feel’ of the responses. There are others who count how frequently a theme has occurred, and then provide a sample of the responses. it entirely depends upon the way you want to communicate the findings to your readers.

Content analysis in qualitative research – an example

The above four-step process was applied to a study recently carried out by the author to develop an operational service model, based upon the principle of family engagement. The information was predominantly gathered through in-depth and focus group discus­sions with clients, service providers and service managers. After informal talks with a number of stakeholders, a list of possible issues was developed to form the basis of discus­sions in these in-depth interviews and group discussions. The list was merely a guiding framework and was open to inclusion of any new issue that emerged during the discus­sions. Out of the several issues that were identified to examine various aspects of the model, here the author has taken only one to show the process of identifying themes that emerged during the discussions. Note that these themes have not been quantified. They are substantiated as verbatim, which is one of the main differences between qualitative and quantitative research. The following example shows perceived strengths of the Family Engagement Model (FEM) as identified by the stakeholders during in-depth interviews and focus groups. Information provided in Figure 15.8 provides an example of the out­come of this process.

Source: Kumar Ranjit (2012), Research methodology: a step-by-step guide for beginners, SAGE Publications Ltd; Third edition.

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