Analyzing Qualitative Data. Graham R Gibbs
research is done.
Qualitative researchers are interested in accessing experiences, interactions and documents in their natural context and in a way that gives room to the particularities of them and the materials in which they are studied.
Qualitative research refrains from setting up a well-defined concept of what is studied and from formulating hypotheses in the beginning in order to test them. Rather, concepts (or hypotheses, if they are used) are developed and refined in the process of research.
Qualitative research starts from the idea that methods and theories should be appropriate to what is studied. If the existing methods do not fit with a concrete issue or field, they are adapted or new methods or approaches are developed.
Researchers themselves are an important part of the research process, either in terms of their own personal presence as researchers, or in terms of their experiences in the field and with the reflexivity they bring to the role – as are members of the field under study.
Qualitative research takes context and cases seriously for understanding an issue under study. A lot of qualitative research is based on case studies or a series of case studies, and often the case (its history and complexity) is an important context for understanding what is studied.
A major part of qualitative research is based on texts and writing – from field notes and transcripts to descriptions and interpretations and finally to the presentation of the findings and of the research as a whole. Therefore, issues of transforming complex social situations (or other materials such as images) into texts – issues of transcribing and writing in general – are major concerns of qualitative research.
If methods are supposed to be adequate to what is under study, approaches to defining and assessing the quality of qualitative research (still) have to be discussed in specific ways that are appropriate for qualitative research and even for specific approaches in qualitative research.
Scope of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit
Designing Qualitative Research (Uwe Flick) gives a brief introduction to qualitative research from the point of view of how to plan and design a concrete study using qualitative research in one way or another. It is intended to outline a framework for the other books in The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit by focusing on how-to-do problems and on how to solve such problems in the research process. The book addresses issues of constructing a research design in qualitative research; it outlines stumbling blocks in making a research project work and discusses practical problems such as resources in qualitative research but also more methodological issues like the quality of qualitative research and also ethics. This framework is filled out in more detail in the other books in the Kit.
Three books are devoted to collecting or producing data in qualitative research. They take up the issues briefly outlined in the first book and approach them in a much more detailed and focused way for the specific method. First, Doing Interviews (Svend Brinkmann and Steinar Kvale) addresses the theoretical, epistemological, ethical and practical issues of interviewing people about specific issues or their life history. Doing Ethnography (Amanda Coffey) focuses on the second major approach to collecting and producing qualitative data. Here again practical issues (like selecting sites, methods of collecting data in ethnography, special problems of analyzing them) are discussed in the context of more general issues (ethics, representations, quality and adequacy of ethnography as an approach). In Doing Focus Groups (Rosaline Barbour) the third of the most important qualitative methods of producing data is presented. Here again we find a strong focus on how-to-do issues of sampling, designing and analyzing the data and on how to produce them in focus groups.
Three further volumes are devoted to analyzing specific types of qualitative data. Using Visual Data in Qualitative Research (Marcus Banks) extends the focus to the third type of qualitative data (beyond verbal data coming from interviews and focus groups and observational data). The use of visual data has not only become a major trend in social research in general, but confronts researchers with new practical problems in using them and analyzing them and produces new ethical issues. In Analyzing Qualitative Data (Graham R. Gibbs), several practical approaches and issues of making sense of any sort of qualitative data are addressed. Special attention is paid to practices of coding, of comparing and of using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis. Here, the focus is on verbal data like interviews, focus groups or biographies. Doing Conversation, Discourse and Document Analysis (Tim Rapley) extends this focus to different types of data, relevant for analyzing discourses. Here, the focus is on existing material (like documents) and on recording everyday conversations and on finding traces of discourses. Practical issues such as generating an archive, transcribing video materials and how to analyze discourses with such types of data are discussed.
Three final volumes go beyond specific forms of data or single methods and take a broader approach. Doing Grounded Theory (Uwe Flick) focuses on an integrated research programme in qualitative research. Doing Triangulation and Mixed Methods (Uwe Flick) addresses combinations of several approaches in qualitative research or with quantitative methods. Managing Quality in Qualitative Research (Uwe Flick) takes up the issue of quality in qualitative research, which has been briefly addressed in specific contexts in other books in the Kit, in a more general way. Here, quality is looked at from the angle of using or reformulating existing criteria, or defining new criteria for qualitative research. This book examines the ongoing debates about what should count as defining ‘quality’ and validity in qualitative methodologies and examines the many strategies for promoting and managing quality in qualitative research.
Before I go on to outline the focus of this book and its role in the Kit, I would like to thank some people at SAGE who were important in making this Kit happen. Michael Carmichael suggested this project to me some time ago and was very helpful with his suggestions in the beginning. Patrick Brindle, Katie Metzler and Mila Steele took over and continued this support, as did Victoria Nicholas and John Nightingale in making books out of the manuscripts we provided.
About this book and its second edition
Uwe Flick
Sometimes, analyzing qualitative data is seen as the core of qualitative research in general, whereas the collection of data is more the preliminary step to prepare for this. There are various approaches to analyzing data in qualitative research, some of them more general, others more specific for certain types of data. They all have in common that they are based on textual analysis, so that any sort of material in qualitative research has to be prepared for analysis as text. In some cases, the internal structure of a text (for example, as a narrative) is more important for the analysis than in other cases (like in a semi-structured interview). And in some cases the content is at the centre of the analysis (sometimes exclusively), in other cases, the interaction in the text is relevant as well (as in focus groups) or the central focus of the analysis (as in conversation analysis).
In this book, the basic analytic strategies of analyzing qualitative data are unfolded in detail. The first focus is on coding and categorizing. The second focus is on narratives and biographies. A third focus is on the use of computers in this context. Considerable attention is paid to comparative analysis and issues of quality and ethics specific to analyzing data. On a more practical level, the use of the three major software programs for analyzing qualitative data (ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, NVivo) is presented in a comparative perspective – showing what can be done with them and how they influence the analysis.
In this second edition, the references to literature and the presentation of the software have been updated. The discussion of preparing data for analysis has been extended, as have areas such as how to apply qualitative analysis to studying discourses and narratives. The discussion of comparative analysis is also expanded in this new edition.
With these focuses, this book first of all provides a basis for analyzing all sorts of qualitative data in verbal data like statements and stories. In the context of The SAGE Qualitative Research Kit, it is complemented by the book by Rapley (2018), which is more about the analysis of interactions, and conversations