Qualitative coding and analysis
A collection of articles on the analysis and coding of qualitative data
Qualitative analysis
How do you actually analyse qualitative data? How do you turn the results from your research into findings that can answer your research questions? Analysing qualitative data requires drawing meaning from it...
Making the leap from qualitative coding to analysis
So you spend weeks or months coding all your qualitative data. Maybe you even did it multiple times, using different frameworks and research paradigms. You've followed our introduction guides and everything is neatly...
Circles and feedback loops in qualitative research
The best qualitative research forms an iterative loop, examining, and then re-examining. There are multiple reads of data, multiple layers of coding, and hopefully, constantly improving theory and insight into the underlying lived... world.
Stepping back from qualitative software and reading coded qualitative data
There is a lot of concern that qualitative analysis software distances people from their data. Some say that it encourages reductive behaviour, prevents deep reading of the data, and leads to a very quantified type of qualitative analysis...
What actually is Grounded Theory? A brief introduction
“It's where you make up as you go along!” For a lot of students, Grounded Theory is used to describe a qualitative analytical method, where you create a coding...
An introduction to Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is an increasingly popular approach to qualitative inquiry and essentially an attempt to understand how participants experience and make meaning of their world...
Triangulation in qualitative research
Most qualitative research will be designed to integrate insights from a variety of data sources, methods and interpretations to build a deep picture. Triangulation is the term used to describe this comparison and meshing of different data...
Analytical memos and notes in qualitative data analysis and coding
There is a lot more to qualitative coding than just deciding which sections of text belong in which theme. It is a continuing, iterative and often subjective process, which can take weeks or even months. During this time...
Coding Qualitative Data
Developing and populating a qualitative coding framework in Quirkos
In previous blog articles I've looked at some of the methodological considerations in developing a coding framework. This article looks at top-down or bottom-up approaches, whether you...
Qualitative coding with the head and the heart
In the analysis of qualitative data, it can be easy to fall in the habit of creating either very descriptive, or very general theoretical codes. It's often a good idea to take a step...
Play and Experimentation in Qualitative Analysis
In the last blog post article, I talked about the benefits of visualising qualitative data, not just in the communication and dissemination stage, but also during data analysis. For newcomers to the...
Top-down or bottom-up qualitative coding
In framework analysis, sometimes described as a top-down or 'a-priori' approach, the researcher decides on the topics of interest they will look for before they start the analysis, usually...
Turning qualitative coding on its head
For the first time in ages I attended a workshop on qualitative methods, run by the wonderful Johnny Saldana. Developing software has become a full time (and then some) occupation for me...
In vivo coding and revealing life from the text
Following on from the last blog post on creating weird and wonderful categories to code your qualitative data, I want to talk about an often overlooked way of creating coding topics using...
Against entomologies of coding
I was recently privileged to chair a session at ICQI 2017 entitled “The Archaeology of Coding”. It had a fantastic panel of speakers, including...
Integrating policy analysis into your qualitative research
It’s easy to get seduced by the excitement of primary data collection, and plan your qualitative research around methods that give you rich data from face-to-face contact with participants. But some research questions may be better illustrated or even mostly answered by analysis of existing documents...
Merging and splitting themes in qualitative analysis
To merge or to split qualitative codes, that is the question... One of the most asked questions when designing a qualitative coding structure is “How many codes should I...
Balance and rigour in qualitative coding frameworks
Training researchers to use qualitative software and helping people who get stuck with Quirkos, I get to see a lot of people’s coding frameworks. Most of the time they are great, often they are fine but have too many codes, but sometimes they just seem to lack a little balance...
Word clouds and word frequency analysis in qualitative data
What’s this blog post about? Well, it’s visualised in the graphic above! In the latest update for Quirkos, we have added a new and much requested feature, word clouds! I'm sure you've used these pretty tools before, they show a random display of all the words in a source of text...
Building queries to explore qualitative data
So, you've spent days, weeks, or even months coding your qualitative data. Now what Hopefully, just the process of being forced to read through the data, and thinking about the...
6 meta-categories for qualitative coding and analysis
When doing analysis and coding in a qualitative research project, it is easy to become completely focused on the thematic framework, and deciding what a section of text is about. However...