Charities and third sector organisations are often sitting on lots of very useful qualitative evidence, and I have already written a short blot post article on some common sources of data that can support funding applications, evaluations and impact assessments. We wanted to do a ‘qualitative case study’: to work with one local charity to explore what qualitative evidence they already had, what they could collect, and use Quirkos to

  You’ll find a lot of information and debate about sampling issues in qualitative research: discussions over ‘random’ or ‘purposeful’ sampling, the merits and pitfalls of ubiquitous ‘snowball’ sampling, and unending questions about sample size and saturation. I’m actually going to address most of these in the next blog post, but wanted to paradoxically start by looking at recruitment.

  Interviews are a frequently used research method in qualitative studies. You will see dozens of papers that state something like “We conducted n in-depth semi-structured interviews with key informants”. But what exactly does this mean? What exactly counts as in-depth? How structured are semi-structured interviews?   This post is hosted by Quirkos, simple and affordable software for qualitative analysis. Download a 1

  About this time last year, I posted an update on Quirkos development for the next year. Even though February continues to be cold and largely snow-drop free in Scotland, why not make it a tradition?!   It’s really amazing how much Quirkos has grown over the last 18 months since our first release. We now have hundreds of users in more than 50 universities across the world. The best part of this is that we now get much more

  Last week’s blog post looked at the transcription process, and what’s involved in getting qualitative interview or focus-group data transcribed. This week, we are going to step back, and share a few tips from researchers into what makes for good quality audio that will be easy to hear and transcribe.   1. Phones aren’t good enough While many smartphones can now be used in a ‘voice memo’ mode to record