We have the data...
 Read through first document in its entirety
 Read through the document again while making notes,
comments, descriptive headings in the margins
 Keep a journal of your thoughts while you are reading.
This will become critical during your analysis. Make it
detailed so that you understand what you were thinking at
that time. It will change as your analysis progresses
 Read subsequent documents following the same strategy
What are we looking for?
 Concepts/themes
 Patterns
and relationships
 Delineating context—meaning/experience can’t be
understood without context
 Process—significant changes in patterns of events
and the circumstances that seem to be related to
those shifts
 Process as a change in
action/emotions/meanings/perceptions in response
to incoming stimuli
Where do we start?
Strategies for analysis
 Analyze an event and to ask questions about it
 Look at language. For example, this person uses word we, we,
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we. But in the same paragraph he changes the pronoun to I.
When does he use we and when I? What might this be telling
me?
Provide conceptual labels on the various events
Make comparisons between conceptual labels (are they the
same? Different?)
Make notations of something that strikes the analyst as relevant
Look for what emotions, experience, events, and action that is
being described
Ask what assumptions, cultural beliefs, knowledge, education
level etc. are evident in the data
Now What?
 Look at the separate parts, compare them for their essential features,
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and say what are these pointing to, or what do these things have in
common
Return to the data and study it
Ask questions about the data. What is going on here? What larger
experience is being described?
Make comparisons between concepts. Is there a common element
between them? What do these concepts point to? Are all of these
concepts at the same level? Does one seem more to explain more
than the others?
Categories are tentative and can be changed as our analysis
progresses.
It is important that categories are distinct, that one is able to
differentiate one category from another
How do we find patterns?
 Use diagrams and tables to organize the data
 Comments from your journal or memos
 Ask yourself what seems to be going on here, what strikes me as
significant about all of this?
 What if something doesn’t fit? (A negative case)
 It can provide further insight into the phenomena
 It can provide alternate explanations for what is occurring
 It allows for the concept to be fully explored
How do we ensure the
accuracy of our
interpretations?
 Test rival explanations
 Triangulation of methods (interviews, internal memos, etc.)
 Have someone else analyze the same documents and compare
interpretations
 Have respondents review your findings