Qualitative Data Analysis

Our mixed methods design can be considered a convergent parallel design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011). At present, our students are focusing on the qualitative data collection and considering how one might go about analyzing it.
One question we have asked our oldest old participants is: What is your relationship like with your primary health provider now?

The quant part of me wants to reduce this/shape this to how long have they had this relationship? How often do they see him/her? On a scale of one to ten – how much would they say they liked the provider?

Since that is not our objective with this question, the task is to look at all of the text we have from all participants on this question, pull it together and let the data inform us. Creswell and Plano Clark (2011, p. 207) talk about coding these data. We do this by breaking the words down into meaningful units (not numbers) and then looking at what these units depict overall.

This of course, is much closer to real life, since we rarely ask our peers if they would describe their work satisfaction, for example, on a scale of 1-10 but rather ask them how they might like their job or particular aspects of it. We might then detect disappointment or excitement as a theme in our peer’s answer about work satisfaction. This simple change in question format lets our peers speak freely, unconstrained and can indeed provide a richer response than a number on a scale. We are not deducting via numbers but rather inducting possible themes originating from individual personal experience. In this way, qualitative research can be thought of as more expansive than quantitative research.

While there are software programs that will do this coding for us, our students are working on coding a few questions from the data they actually collected. In this way, I also find qualitative analysis much more hands on than quantitative work whereby the researcher really gets an active feel for the data in its raw form.

Neat!

AES

Creswell, J.W. & Plano Clark, V.L. (2011). Designing and conducting Mixed
Methods Research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.