Analyzing Qualitative Data. Graham R Gibbs
your respondents.
Information about the provenance of a document is kept in a document summary or a cover sheet (so called because when transcripts were typewritten such data was kept on the separate, top or cover sheet of paper). If you are producing electronic transcripts (such as word processor files) then it is a simple matter to include this information at the start of your file. Typical contents are listed in Box 2.3.
BOX 2.3 Typical contents of meta-data documents
Document summary form or document description
Typically, this would summarize information about an interview and includes (as appropriate):
Date of interview.
Biographical details about the respondent.
Topic and circumstances of interview.
Name of interviewer.
Source of field notes relevant to interview.
Linked documents (e.g. previous and subsequent interviews).
Source of document (full reference).
Initial ideas for analysis.
Pseudonym of person interviewed and other anonymizing references.
Preparing for Archives
In some cases you may want to deposit your data into an archive so that others can use your work and possibly re-analyze it. In the UK there is an organization, the UK Data Service, that can advise on this. Their website, www.ukdataservice.ac.uk/deposit-data, contains detailed advice on what you need to do. As I mentioned above, you will need to anonymize the transcripts, but archives normally want to have the unanonymized originals too, along with details of how they were anonymized. Secondary users of the data are obliged to maintain anonymity as you have done. If material is particularly sensitive you can make the material closed for a certain period or restrict access to it.
Archives normally need all the various accompanying material you used. This includes documentation such as the cover sheets just discussed and field notes and other written or printed documents you have collected along with details of your sampling strategy, your interview schedules, etc. It may take some time and effort to get all these materials into a suitable state for depositing them. If you are required to archive your data (as projects funded by the ESRC are) then allow resources for this (see Rapley, 2018).
Getting Organized
In qualitative analysis, not only will you have to deal with lots of data (transcripts, images, videos, documents, etc.) but the very process of analysis will create lots more documents (coded transcripts, memos, research diary, document summaries, etc.). So you will need to work out some way of organizing and managing all the material. There is no doubt that these days the preferred way of managing your project materials is to use CAQDAS. Programs like ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, NVivo and QDA Miner are designed not only with functions to help your analysis but also to help you keep on top of all the material you will have and will create. If you use such a program you will be able to keep all your project documents in one place and the program will prompt you to create a meaningful organization for them and add appropriate meta-data.
But you don’t have to use CAQDAS. If you don’t have access to the software or your project is small and/or you don’t have time to learn to use the software, then you can carry out your analysis using a PC and paper (and of course, in the days before there were PCs, researchers just used paper). It is most likely that you will be using a PC to manage all your data and analysis, though even these days, there may be some books, reports and documents that you can only get in some non-digital form, but you will have notes about them that you can keep on your PC. Box 2.4 lists some of the documents you will have to manage.
BOX 2.4 Data and documents that need to be managed
Field notes.
Interview transcripts (and audio/video recordings).
Focus group transcripts (and audio/video recordings).
Cover documents for interviews, focus groups, etc.
Documents (including organizational/admin. documents and websites).
Media documents and social media documents (news clippings, Tweets, etc.).
Ethics documents (signed consent forms, information sheets, etc.).
Letters and emails (permissions, arrangements, etc.).
Survey responses (completed questionnaires, spreadsheets, etc.).
Organizational charts, diagrams, etc.
Research diary.
Memos and other analytic writing you do.
Policy documents, government reports, etc.
Reports and papers you write based on the analysis.
Relevant academic literature (commonly lots of pdfs these days) and your notes on the literature.
The simplest way to organize things on your PC is by the use of folders. For example, you might have a folder for each case in your study and perhaps also folders for each setting you have visited (e.g. your cases might be schoolteachers and the settings might be the schools you went to to observe and interview the teachers). It might make sense to include dates in the names of these folders to record when the data were collected. This may be particularly important if you undertake multiple rounds of data collection. You may also have folders for documents you have collected (including any organizational data) and any survey data (if you are doing mixed methods research). The CAQDAS programs allow you to make similar arrangements within your project file.
You may also have a folder for all your notes about the literature you are reviewing for your project. Within that it makes sense to organize your notes thematically, so perhaps have a folder for each major theme in the literature.
The next chapter discusses all the kinds of writing you will do as part of your analysis, so you’ll need to keep that organized too. Files on a PC will all have a date when you created them and when you last changed them. But if you are handwriting notes or keeping a handwritten research diary then it makes sense to put on a date recording when you wrote them or added to them. Not only is it often useful to see in what order you had your ideas and thoughts, but such documents can also form part of an audit trail (see Chapter 7) of your analytic thinking. You will also find you will do lots of cross-referencing. (Who was the head teacher in the school where this interviewee was working? What were the customers this sale representative was dealing with last year?) So it makes sense either to include such data with the pertinent documents (interview transcripts) or to create separate documents like the document summary in Box 2.3.
All these arrangements of folders and files are flexible. Change them and re-arrange them to reflect your changing analytic needs and your developing interpretations. You might even find that the folder structure of your documents reflects the key ways you are developing your analysis. For example, if you keep your memos in thematically named folders you might find the folder names suggest a way of structuring a write up of your analysis. Above all, though, don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can leave all your stuff on the PC desktop and that you are so on top of your material that you can remember where everything is. That may be true for a few weeks, but months if not years later and after your 30th interview the chances are that all you’ll have is a messy PC desktop.
Key Points
Most qualitative data are transcribed into typed (or