Karen O'Reilly

Are you struggling to get started with your qualitative analysis? I have realised that even though I tried my best to keep it as simple as possible in my book, it is still somewhat complicated.

Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone

So let’s be really clear. Do it however works best for you, but just be sure that you can say that you have:  

1) Immersed yourself. get familiar with all the data somehow or other, by listening to it, by reading it, by reading it and making some notes or talking to yourself, whatever. Let’s call this immersion. 

It is also a way of being sure that you are being inductive, bottom-up, listening to your participants, hearing, finding a way to not impose your own ideas and perceptions and assumptions. We might even say it helps you to be objective.

2) Annotated. make sure that as you listened or read, or even did the interviews and listen to them afterwards that you made some notes. Trying to keep everything in your head is impossible and writing things down clarifies them for you and helps you start to think what sense you might make of it all. Let’s call this annotating

3) Coded. Coding is simply a way of finding stuff again. It is adding a code, or coding it up. So coding is not analysis. It is labelling your analysis. 

Analysis is thinking and sorting and linking and sense-making and having your reader in mind at some stage and being very familiar with the data and comfortable that you’ve heard your participants properly. 

But coding is really useful because, like annotating (taking notes), it clarifies, concretises, enables you to start working on linkages and interconnections and gaps. Please do not hold tightly to your codes. You may want to get rid of them, rename them, recode them, or whatever. They are just your way of identifying and finding and thinking.

4) Sensitised. make sure that at some point, you start to think more broadly than just those interviews or field notes and those people. Sensitise yourself to other theories, concepts, literature, even commonsense ideas that might help you formulate an interesting and meaningful analysis. Let’s call this sensitising.

5) iterated. Go backwards and forwards through the steps above.

Pick up a transcript or listen to it again every now and then. Go back to some sections that you had overlooked. You do not have to systematically code up every single piece of data. But you do have to be familiar with it all, immersed in it, confident that you have felt it, heard it, seen it, been there with your participants. 

6) worked on coherence, on pulling it all together, on identifying processes, or themes, or bigger concepts, or pathways, or whatever you want to talk about. 

A little note here, that a theme can be anything. A discourse, a story, process, barriers and incentives, they are all things. A theme is just a thing that’s been sorted and conceptualised. 

7) And I really recommend using memos – because your codes and your lists and your themes and your notes are never enough on their own. You have to work on the analysis. It takes quite a bit of effort for you to work through what links with what in what ways, what concepts help to clarify what you are interested in, what larger theories help to make sense of interconnections and processes, how you want to present your barriers and incentives (never forgetting that every barrier can also be an incentive if turned around). 

Memos are a really good way of working your ideas out on paper, but talk them into a voice recorder, or draw them or chart them, or whatever works for you. Some of us are more visual thinker,  some more verbal, and some prefer to write.

Next: how do we feel confident we’ve got enough to say something interesting? 

(By the way: You will need to read the book Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone to fully understand all this. You might also enjoy The Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone Podcast https://shows.acast.com/qualitative-research-methods-for-everyone-podcast/episodes