This document outlines principles for qualitative data analysis, including that analysis occurs throughout data collection as researchers reflect on impressions and patterns. Researchers then organize collected data for detailed notes and analysis. Throughout the study, researchers comprehensively study all data seeking similarities, differences, categories and themes in a systematic but not rigid process. Data analysis involves reading all data, dividing it into meaningful units, and stopping when regularities emerge, with categories and themes allowed to form from the data through an inductive comparison process. The quality of analysis rests on collaboration to ensure findings reflect people's perceptions.

1. Qualitative Data Analysis: Principles and Practices

2. Analysis occurs throughout the data collection process

3. In the field, researchers should reflect on impressions, relationships, patterns, commonalities, and so on

4. Off the field, researchers should organize the data collected to make detailed notes and analyze the logic and the correspondence of data to initial impressions on the field

5. Throughout the study, researchers should study all the data, seeking similarities, differences, correspondence, categories, themes, concepts and ideas and should analyze the logic of previous analytic outcomes, categories and weakness or gaps in the data

6. The analysis process is systematic and comprehensive, but not rigid

7. The analysis process begins with reading all the data at once and then dividing the data into smaller, more meaningful units

8. Data analysis should stop with the emergence of regularities; i.e. no new information emerges with additional data analysis

9. Data analysis is inductive

10. The data segments are organized into a system that is predominately derived from the data

11. Some guiding categories or themes can be formulated at the beginning of the process

12. Additional categories or themes are allowed to emerge from the data

13. The main analytic process is comparison

14. The researchers use comparison to build and refine categories, define conceptual similarities, find negative evidence, and discover patterns

15. Categories are flexible

16. Categories can be modified as further data analysis occurs

17. Qualitative data is not mechanistic

18. The basis for judging the quality of analysis in a qualitative study rests on collaboration to be sure that the research findings reflect people’s perceptions

19. All people and sources may not agree, and this difference in opinion should be made explicit in the report

20. The result of an analysis is some type of higher-order synthesis in the form of a descriptive picture, patterns or themes, or emerging or substantive theory