qualitative data

1. Analyzing and Coding
Qualitative Research
Basics of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.)
Strauss, A. & Corbin, J. (2007)
ADLT 673, Session 10

2. Collection of tuition waivers
Update on assignments – All
work due by Friday, April 28
Remaining class schedule,
April 20 and 26 (Symposium)
Opportunity for individual
meetings
Discussion of interviews and
focus groups
Data coding and analysis

3. Review of Assignments
Worksheets, Engagement, and Participation
(30%)
CITI Social Behavioral exam, print completion
report (15%)
Outline of a SoTL Research Proposal for
Medical Education (50%)
* Alternative to small group presentation of
project (5%) – Medical Education Research
Symposium

4. Before Data Collection
Setting the boundaries for the study
Purposefully select participants who
are best suited to provide insight into
the research question
Collecting information through
observations, interviews, / focus
groups, documents, and visual
materials

5. The Researcher’s Role
Researcher biases, background, steps taken re:
reflexivity
Why this site? What was done at the site?
Will it be disruptive? How minimize? What effects
might that have on the quality of the data?
How will results be reported? What will the
“gatekeeper” gain from the study?

6. Thoughts on Interviewing
In-depth interviewing is a means to
understand the experience of other people
What, how, and why questions
Use probes (follow-up questions)
Watch for markers and follow them up with a
question to elicit additional information

7. Conducting Focus Groups
Requires a highly skilled facilitator to draw people
out
Goal is to obtain in-depth, “rich, thick” description
Build rapport with group
“Can anyone else relate to that experience” or “Has
anyone else had a different experience?”
Ask for examples, and keep asking for examples

8. Use digital recorder(s) – need 2 or 3 for a table of 12
participants
No more than 4-5 questions per hour/ 6 to 8 in 1.5
hours
Round robin number your participants
If you cannot conduct the interview, ask another
(qualified) person to serve as your facilitator
Use a transcriptionist familiar with qualitative data
Always listen to your data; do not rely on transcripts
alone

9. The detailed line-by-line
analysis necessary at the
beginning of a study to
generate initial categories
and to suggest
relationships among
categories

10. Participants’ recounting of actual
events and actions as they are
remembered and
Texts, observations, videos, or other
materials gathered by the
researcher, and field notes made by
the researcher
Researcher’s memos of
those events, objects, happenings,
and actions
Interplay between data and
researcher as the instrument of
interpretation

11. Qualitative analysis is a way of
thinking about data
Learn to listen, letting the
data speak to the researcher
Learn to relax, adopt a more
flexible, less preplanned, and
less controlled approach to
research

12. Major Points About Data Analysis
Must listen closely, taking into
account the interviewees’
interpretations
Conceptualize and classify
chunks of meaning
Enables researchers to examine
what assumptions about the
data they are taking for granted

13. Conceptualizing is the first step
in analysis or theory building
(in a grounded theory study).
A concept is a labeled
phenomenon.
Can label a word or groups of
words, such as a phrase

14. The researcher’s record of
analysis, thoughts,
interpretations, questions,
and directions for further
data collection.
Often called analytic memos

15. Categories are concepts,
derived from data, that stand
for phenomena.
Phenomena are important
analytic ideas that emerge from
the data.
They answer the question
“What is going on here?”

16. Once concepts begin to
accumulate, the researcher
should begin the process of
grouping them into explanatory
terms called categories.
Example: A researcher is
studying children at play and
notices acts that she labels
“grabbing,” “hiding,”
“avoiding,” and
“discounting.”

17. Then, on observing the
subsequent incident, it
suddenly dawns on the
researcher that what the
children are doing is trying to
avoid something through those
actions.
Thus, grabbing, hiding,
avoiding, and discounting are
grouped under the more
abstract heading of
“strategies.”

18. But strategies for what?
The most probable answer is
to avoid “toy sharing.”
In this manner, it emerges that
one of the important
phenomena to study in relation
to groups of children at play is
“toy sharing,” with “strategies”
for either sharing or not
sharing being a subcategory

19. How would we begin to code
these pages from an actual focus
group transcript of physicians in a
Master Teacher program?
What conceptual labels might you
assign to the passages you read?
Which concepts can be grouped
into categories?
What sense are you making of the
data?

21.  Research Question: What did Master Teachers
learn?
 Focus Group Questions:
 Changes in methods used to teach?
 Changes in clinical practice, and how relate to
patients?
 Specific incident that had a significant impact on
teaching?
 What organizational barriers encountered in
using what was learned?
The Task