Elements of qualitative data
analysis
Graham R Gibbs
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Contents
Books
Online resources
Philosophy
Data preparation
Coding
Narrative
Charts and tables
CAQDAS
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Books
 Gibbs, G.R. (2007) Analyzing Qualitative Data. London: Sage.
 Bernard, H. R., & Ryan, G. W. (2010). Analyzing qualitative data:
Systematic approaches. Los Angeles, [Calif.]; London: SAGE.
 Flick, U. (2009). An introduction to qualitative research. Los Angeles,
[Calif.]; London: SAGE.
 Flick, U. (2013). The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis.
London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
 Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: a
sourcebook of new methods. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. The tables in
this video are taken from this edition, but there is a new edition:
 Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M. & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data
analysis: a sourcebook of new methods. 3rd Ed. Los Angeles, CA:
Sage.
 Ritchie, J., Lewis, J., McNaughton Nicholls, C and Ormston, R (eds)
(2013) Qualitative Research Practice: A Guide for Social Science
Students and Researchers. London: Sage.
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Online resources
 OnlineQDA
– http://onlineqda.hud.ac.uk
 My YouTube Channel
– Graham R Gibbs:
https://www.youtube.com/user/GrahamRGibbs
 MSc Applied Educational and Social Research @
Strathclyde.
– http://www.strath.ac.uk/aer/materials/
 QSR for NVivo
– http://www.qsrinternational.com/
– NCRM
– http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/
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Philosophy
Realist – Critical Realist – Constructivist –
Relativist
Induction – Deduction - Abduction
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Data preparation…
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Transcription: Who should do it?
Self
Audio typist
Dictation/speech recognition software
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Self
Tedious but good because it begins data
analysis
Careful reading of whole transcript
produces new ideas etc.
May have no choice if text in a language
few others can understand.
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Software
Dictation/speech recognition software
– Still not good enough to transcribe voice from tape or
digital recording
– Because needs v. good quality sound AND learns
your own accent as you use it.
– IBM Via Voice or Dragon Dictate
– Can listen to tape and then dictate to computer. Still
at best only 95% accurate.
Transcription software
– E.g. Express Scribe, F4/F5 Transribe.
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Prepare text
Anonymise
– Maybe easier if this is delayed
Check for accuracy
– Member checking (with respondents)?
Use […] for missing text
Use [bribery?] for words you are not sure
about.
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Levels of transcription
People don’t speak in sentences
–
–
–
–
Repeat themselves
Hesitate, stutter
Use contractions (don’t, coz, etc)
Use filler words (like, y’know, er, I mean)
Options
–
–
–
–
Just the gist
Verbatim
Verbatim with dialect
Discourse level.
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Just the gist
“90% of my communication is with … the Sales
Director. 1% of his communication is with me. I
try to be one step ahead, I get things ready, …
because he jumps from one … project to another.
…This morning we did Essex, this afternoon we
did BT, and we haven't even finished Essex
yet.”(… indicates omitted speech)
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Verbatim
“I don’t really know. I’ve a feeling that they’re
allowed to let their emotions show better. I think
bereavement is part of their religion and culture.
They tend to be more religious anyway. I’m not
from a religious family, so I don’t know that side
of it.”
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Verbatim with dialect
“‘s just that – one o’ staff – they wind everybody
up, I mean, – cos I asked for some money – out
o’ the safe, cos they only keep money in the
safe – ’s our money – so I asked for some money
and they wouldn’t give it me – an’ I snatched
this tenner what was mine.”
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Conversation analysis
Bashir: Did you ever (.) personally assist him
with the writing of his book. (0.8)
Princess: A lot of people.hhh ((clears throat))
saw the distress that my life was in. (.) And
they felt it was a supportive thing to help (0.2)
in the way that they did.
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Start analysis…
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Coding/indexing/categorizing
N.B. confusion because used in quantitative
data where it means putting numbers to
answers.
“indexing” “categories” “codes” “themes”
= linking chunks of data (text) as
representative of the same phenomenon.
Not necessarily to count them (cf. Content
analysis)
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Analysis. Bryman suggests
these stages
Stage 1
Read the text as a whole, Make notes at the end
Look for what it is about
Major themes
Unusual issues, events etc
Group cases into types or categories (may
reflect research question – e.g. male and
female)
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Stage 2. Read again
Mark the text (underline, circle, highlight)
Marginal notes/ annotations
Labels for codes
Highlight Key words
Note any analytic ideas suggested.
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Stage 3. Code the text
Systematically mark the text
Indicate what chunks of text are about – themes
– Index them.
Review the codes.
Eliminate repetition and similar codes (combine)
Think of groupings
May have lots of different codes (Don’t worry at
early stage – can be reduced later)
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Stage 4. Relate general
theoretical ideas to the text.
Coding is only part of analysis
You must add your interpretation.
Identify significance for respondents
Interconnections between codes
Relation of codes to research question
and research literature.
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Thematic Coding
Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss + Corbin
+ Charmaz)
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
(Jonathon Smith)
Template analysis (Nigel King)
Framework analysis (Ritchie and Lewis)
All are types of thematic analysis.
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How is coding done?
Text
In a village like this ... the young
fellows in the village don't seem
to have much difficulty when
they're out of work – a fortnight
and they're back again – word of
mouth, I'd say. It’s a different,
tricky situation that I'm in – I just
can't say, “Oh, I heard there's a
job going on building site, I’ll go
and have a go for it.” I wouldn't
be able to do that.
Code
Age contrast
Residence focus
Young find work easily
Word of mouth
Contrast situation
Constrained
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Questions to ask
 Look for the gerunds – the doing…
 "What is going on?
 What are people doing?
 What is the person saying?
 What do these actions and statements take for
granted?
 How do structure and context serve to support,
maintain, impede or change these actions and
statements?"
(Charmaz 2003: 94-95)
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What can codes be about?
Lofland suggests:
1. Acts – usually brief events
2. Activities – of longer duration in a setting, people involved
3. Meanings – what directs participants’ actions?
a) What concepts they use to understand their world
b) What meaning or significance it has for them.
4. Participation – People’ involvement or adaptation to a
setting
5. Relationships – between people, considered
simultaneously
6. Settings – the entire context of the events under study
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What can codes be about? 2
Strauss suggests
 Conditions
 Interactions
 Strategies and tactics
 Consequences What happens if…
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Ways to identify themes
Ryan and Bernard (2003)
Repetitions
Indigenous typologies (in vivo)
Metaphors and analogies
Transitions (pauses, sections)
Similarities and Differences
– Constant comparison
Linguistic connectors
– Because, before, after, next, closeness, examples
Missing data (what is omitted)
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Coding supports 2 forms of
analysis
Retrieval
Using the coding frame
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1. Retrieval
Retrieve all the text coded with the same label =
all passages about the same phenomenon, idea,
explanation or activity - Literally cut and paste
Used envelopes/files - Now done using software
Enables cross case comparison on same theme.
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2. Developing the coding frame
Use the list of codes to examine further
kinds of analytic questions, e.g.
– relationships between the codes (and the text
they code)
– Code dimensions
– grouping cases
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Data driven or concept driven?
Inductive or deductive
Most qualitative analysis does both
i.e. start with some theoretical ideas
these derived from literature, research
brief/questions, interview schedule
and
discover new ideas, theories, explanations in the
data.
Strauss - sociologically constructed codes vs. in
vivo codes
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Description to analytic
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
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BARRY
Well, the only thing that we've really given up is - well we used to
go dancing. Well she can't do it now so I have to go on my own,
that's the only thing really. And then we used to go indoor bowling
at the sports centre. But of course, that's gone by the board now. So
we don't go there. But I manage to get her down to works club, just
down the road on the occasional Saturdays, to the dances. She'll sit
and listen to the music, like, stay a couple of hours and then she's
had enough. And then, if it's a nice weekend I take her out in the
car.
‘Dancing’, ‘Indoor bowling’, ‘Dances at works club’,
‘Drive together’
‘Joint activities ceased’, ‘Joint activities continuing’
‘Loss of physical co-ordination’, ‘Togetherness’,
‘Doing for’, ‘Resignation’, ‘Core activity’
Descriptive codes
Categories
Analytic codes
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Example code hierarchy
Friendship types
– Close, generalized
– Sporting
• Club
• Non-club
– Work
Changes in Friendship
– Making new friends
• New same sex friends
• New different sex friends
– Losing touch
– Becoming sexual relationships
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Example showing analysis
 One of a set of interviews by Wendy Hollway and Tony
Jefferson.
 On fear of crime
 Will use some of this for a group work exercise.
 Part of interview with:
 Barbara 65, F, White,Retired nursing auxiliary,
Interview covered, Husband's death, ill health, sister prison, stealing & drug taking, tenants association. From
low crime area.
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INT
So you say - well 2 of those things happened after - when you've
been talking to this accountant friend of yours. How did it come
up? I mean that's er, you'd been alone for quite a while ....
BARBARA They'd been burgled.
INT
Right.
BARBARA And they got through a little window like this. Actually 'e'd got a
young lad with 'im. And er, Margaret's engagement ring and she
says "that was the one thing - that was the one thing, it grieved
me more than anything" she said. "They could 'ave the
television, the lot" she said. But the fact that they took 'er
engagement ring…
INT
Yeah.
BARBARA That upset 'er. And er, we were just talking in general and - and
it came up and I says er, "I've got a chain on my door." And 'e
says er, "it's not strong enough that, Barbara." He says "you
really want something else on" and 'e went - his daughter lived
up Stokebridge and 'e went to a little shop up there, or
something. And got me that chain…
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BARBARA …And 'e put it on and you can lock it. If you put it on as you're
going out, er, its 'ook, and then you 'ave to unlock it to let it drop.
INT
Ah ha.
BARBARA When you come in.
INT
Oh right.
BARBARA You know, you can push the door and it - oh and it is strong as
well.
INT
Ah ha. And the 4 locks on the back? Do they date back further?
BARBARA Oh God, yeah.
INT
So you had lots of security even when your husband was alive?
BARBARA Oh yeah, mmm. Mmm. Em, I've got one of those dead locks at
the top.
INT
Yeah.
BARBARA You know, they're just a hole in the door and they're not from
outside, they're only from inside. And even that locks wrong way.
You 'ave to turn it that way to unlock it. (laugh).
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Notice
Interviewer and respondent names are in
capitals
Wide margins and space and a half
between lines
Use of contractions
Place names and people’s names
anonymised
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Read through
About neighbour being burgled
Lost TV etc. and engagement ring
Old and new security on front door.
Replaced by friend.
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Mark up text
Annotations and codes.
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Coding Frame
Crime experienced (the type of crime
participants discuss having experienced
themselves or by their friends and neighbours).
– Burglary
– Vandalism
– Violence
But these descriptive. Be analytic. E.g.
– Low level (not reported etc.)
– Significant (with emotional impact)
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Coding Frame, cont.
 Security measures (What measures people have taken
to protect themselves, their property etc. both in the past
and more recently).
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Chain
Dead lock
Burglar alarm
Safe
Car alarms
Personal Alarm
Stay in
Walk with others
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Coding Frame, cont.
But these descriptive. Be analytic. E.g.
– Physical, technology
– Behavioural
– Psychological (lights on timer etc.)
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Coding Frame, cont.
Feelings about experience of crime
– Frightened
– Hurt by loss (especially personal items)
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Descriptive vs Analytic/theoretical
Descriptive
– Just what the people said
– What happened
– Their terms
Analytic
– Use social science theory
– Groups codes together
– Use terms the respondents don’t or wouldn’t
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Narrative…
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Narrative, Life History and Biography
Story and narrative = the way that social actors
produce, represent and contexualize their experience
and personal knowledge. How they make sense of
what happened.
Narrative is the wide, general term.
Story restricted to genre that recounts protagonists,
events, complications and consequences.
Data can come from interviews, biography,
autobiography, life history interview, personal letters,
diaries etc.
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Three Theorists
 Norman Denzin
– Narrative as a story of a sequence of events with
significance for narrator and audience.
– Story has beginning, middle and end and a logic.
Narratives are temporal = have a causal sequence.
 Catherine Kohler Riessman (1993) Elliot Mishler
(1986)
– During research interviews, respondents often include
lengthy stories.
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Four types of narrative/life history.
Lieblich et al (1998)
Content
Form
Holistic
1
2
Categorical
3
4
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1. Holistic content
Looks at complete life story and examines its
content. Familiar in clinical case studies.
Use familiar qualitative methods to identify key
themes.
Look for transitions between themes
Episodes that seem to contradict themes in terms of
content, mood or evaluation by the narrator.
Pay attention to the issues that are not mentioned.
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Typical themes
Relational story - constantly referring to others.
Belonging and separateness.
Closeness, remoteness and experience of moving.
The meaning of the occupation (e.g vocation)
Relations with opposite sex
Can focus on early life as determinant of later
actions. (following Adler)
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2. Holistic form
Looks at the plot or structure of complete life stories.
Romance hero faces a series of challenges en route to
his goal and eventual victory
Comedy
Tragedy
Satire
goal is the restoration of social order and the
hero must have the requisite social skills to
overcome the hazards that threaten that order.
the hero is defeated by the forces of evil and is
ostracised from society.
a cynical perspective on social hegemony
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Progression
Does story ascend or descend? Climax, turning
point (epiphany) etc.
Advance - story moves to better things
Regression - story moves to worse things
Stable - plot is steady, neither worse nor
better, just the same.
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3. Categorical content
Essentially a content analysis. Extract
categories, and count and cross-tabulate.
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4. Categorical form
Discrete linguistic or stylistic linguistic characteristics.
Metaphors used, passive vs. active.
e.g. use linguistic features to identify inner meaning of
events to narrator.
 Adverbials like suddenly may indicate how expected or
unexpected events were.
 Mental verbs like I thought, I understood, and I noticed, may
indicate extent to which an experience is in consciousness and
can be remembered.
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4. Categorical form cont.
 Denotations of time and place may indicate attempts to
distance an event or bring it closer
 Past, present and future tense in verbs and transition
between them, may indicate a speaker’s sense of
identification with the events described.
 Transitions between first-person, second-person and thirdperson voice may indicate difficulty of re-encountering a
difficult experience.
 Passive and active verbs may indicate speaker’s perception of
agency.
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4. Categorical form cont.
 Breaking chronological or causal flow with digressions,
regressions, leaps in time etc. may indicate attempts to avoid
discussion difficult experience.
 Repetition may indicate that subject of discussion elicits an
emotional charge for narrator.
 Detailed description may indicate reluctance to describe
difficult emotions.
 Method - underline just the words referring to the factual
events described. Then examine all the words not
underlined.
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Formal narrative analysis…
Use the structure to identify how people tell stories
the way they do.
How they give shape to events
How they make a point
How they ‘package’ the narrated events
Their reaction to events
How they articulate their narratives with the
audience.
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Forms and Functions of Stories
A way of passing cultural heritage or organizational
culture.
– e.g. use of atrocity stories and morality fables in
occupational and organizational settings
– medical settings use of fables of incompetence gives
warnings of what not to do)
– Oral culture of schoolchildren - urban legends.
 A way of coming to terms with particularly sensitive or
traumatic times or events. E.g. divorce or violence.
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Forms and Functions cont.
To structure idea of self and self identity.
– Psychological view. Stories imitate life and present an
inner reality to the outside world. They shape
narrator’s identity. The story is one’s identity. We
know or discover ourselves and reveal ourselves to
others by the stories we tell.
Show how the actor frames and makes sense of a
particular set of experiences E.g.
–
–
–
–
Measures of success
Overcoming adversity
Good and bad practice
Explanations of success or failure
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Success and moral tales
Collective reminder of what not to do and how not
to be.
Common theme = overcoming of difficulties and
achievement of success
Challenge –> Adversity –> Success.
+ Key turning points (epiphanies)
Can use these as a starting point for further
exploration in analysis.
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Narrative as chronicle.
A form of autobiography.
Actors organize their lives through stories and so
make sense of them.
“How it happened” “how I came to be where I am
today.”
e.g. Notion of CAREER
occupational career
other social roles - e.g. parent, children, patients.
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Diagrams, charts and tables…
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Use for…
Clarification in elicitation process (share with
respondents)
Develop ideas about a model, processes etc.
Illustrate examples and your argument
Lay out data so that patterns can be discovered
Data reduction
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Miles, M.B. and Huberman, A.M. (1994) Qualitative data analysis: a sourcebook of new methods.
Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. p. 133
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Matrices
Simple, like crosstabs. Exclusive values in each cell
Or
Non-exclusive values in each cell
See: Ritchie, J. and Lewis, J. (eds) (2003) Qualitative
Research Practice: A Guide for Social Science
Students and Researchers. London: Sage.
67
Character of company departments
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Summary responses by codes
Cells contain typical or summaries of text
from respondents
E.g. Job search strategies by gender
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Job search strategies by gender
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Example of a comparison within a single case
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Flow of people through job finding services
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Miles, M.B. and Huberman, A.M. (1994) Qualitative data analysis: a sourcebook of
new methods. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. p. 225.
Slide 73
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CAQDAS
Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis
CAQDAS Networking Project
– http://www.surrey.ac.uk/sociology/research/rese
archcentres/caqdas/
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Current best selling programs
NVivo
Atlas.ti
MAXQDA
HyperRESEARCH
QDAMiner
But still small companies cf. Microsoft.
– NVivo sold 400,000, vs Millions for Office
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Functions
 Coding - mark text with code
 Retrieve - show all text coded the same way.
 Complex retrievals – e.g. text coded with two codes.
 Memos
 Search (text and codes) & Textual analysis tools
 Charts & diagrams
 Link with quants data
 Relations
 Word and pdf documents
 Images, video and audio
 GIS
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Debates about CAQDAS
Distant from data
Too easy to move to quantify
Dominance of code and retrieve
– Vs narrative thread
– Vs postmodern variation
Fragmentation and decontextualisation
Coding loses interaction in focus groups
Needs time and resources to learn
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Advantage of CAQDAS
Faster and more efficient
Helps explanations (eg. Use face sheet
data)
Supports transparency
Code trees encourage looking at
connections
Avoids anecdotalism - can check
frequency
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