Doing Qualitative Research Using Your Computer

A Practical Guide

Chris Hahn

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412946933, 9781412946926
• eBook ISBN: 9781446242339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

?I find your straightforward writing style an absolute joy, such a breath of fresh air!? - Angie Ash, PhD student

?…thank you very much for your accessible language, clear lay out and practical applied approach. I suspect that this book will never be far from my side over the next 4 years!!? - Mayen Konarski, PhD student

Using straight-forward language Doing Qualitative Research Using Your Computer walks readers through the process of managing and streamlining research projects using commonly available Microsoft software applications.

Drawing on a wide range of examples to demonstrate how easy it is to use such software, this guide is full of useful hints and tips on how to manage research more efficiently and effectively, including:

- Formatting transcripts for maximum coding efficiency in Microsoft Word

- Using features of Word to organize the analysis of data and to facilitate efficient qualitative coding

- Synchronizing codes, categories, and important concepts between Microsoft Word and Microsoft Access

- Efficiently storing and analyzing the qualitative data in Microsoft Excel

- Creating flexible analytic memos in Access that help lead the researcher to final conclusions

Ideal for those students or researchers who don?t want to invest in expensive specialised software packages, this guide will be an invaluable companion for anyone embarking on their own research project.

CHAPTER

1

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Introduction, coding terminology, and the big picture

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant

If, as Kant suggests, science is organized knowledge, then qualitative researchers have a special challenge because of the nebulous nature of their raw data. A great deal of knowledge and wisdom is enmeshed in the stories of elders, open-ended interviews, field observations, folk art, pictures, and artifacts collected by qualitative researchers. But how can these data be organized and analyzed to create scientifically acceptable conclusions? Coherent and well-elucidated strategies are required to produce defensible results from free-form qualitative data. The science of qualitative research depends on the intelligent organization and analysis of rich and complex qualitative data without the time-tested statistical tools that dominate the world of quantitative analysis.

The qualitative researcher discovers the quality and character of lived experiences by collecting data that are not bound by the constraints of quantitative methods. Qualitative data do not have to measure a predetermined set of variables using a large population of randomly sampled subjects. That is the good news. The bad news is that qualitative data can be overwhelming unless they are carefully organized and distilled.

Only with intelligent analysis can scientific conclusions be drawn from the volumes of data that are usually collected during the course of a qualitative research project. This book is full of techniques, technological tips, and tools to help beginning, intermediate, and advanced qualitative researchers work smarter and faster without abandoning their qualitative method of choice.

Many prominent and well-respected scholars have wrestled with the problems and opportunities inherent to qualitative research. Over time these intellectual explorations into the qualitative world have produced wide-ranging and well-documented theoretical and methodological approaches to research problems commonly encountered by qualitative researchers. The practical focus of this book is possible because it builds upon the highly valued pre-existing body of qualitative research knowledge.

Qualitative methods are diverse

Investigators may use grounded theory, ethnography, case studies, focus groups, phenomenology, or creative mixed methods to guide their research designs. Data may be gathered from interviews, observations, participant-observations, field notes, public documents, photographs, audio-visual recordings, journals, artifacts, and sensations such as smell or taste. All of these methods and data gathering practices are supported by existing literature.

The step-by-step techniques and technological guidelines in this book focus on making qualitative researchers more efficient and their projects more valued by helping them more effectively plan, organize, and control their projects. These techniques must be used in tandem with the theoretical underpinnings of qualitative research. I encourage readers of this book to refer often to research methods texts. A tiny sampling of the qualitative methods literature follows so new investigators can get an introductory grasp of qualitative fundamentals.

Grounded theorists endeavor to develop solid hypotheses from the wide-ranging data they collect. The data are often collected through interviews and/or observations. In the words of Strauss and Corbin,

In speaking about qualitative analysis, we are referring not to the quantifying of qualitative data but rather to a nonmathematical process of interpretation, carried out for the purpose of discovering concepts and relationships in raw data and then organizing these into a theoretical explanatory scheme (Strauss and Corbin, 1998, p. 11).

Case study researchers focus on a single case or multiple cases to

understand complex social phenomena. In brief, the case study method allows investigators to retain the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events – such as individual life cycles, organization and managerial processes, neighborhood change, international relations, and maturation of industries (Yin, 2003, p. 2).

Ethnographers immerse themselves in the everyday experiences of the people and objects of their study through fieldwork.

First, the ethnographer enters into a social setting and gets to know the people involved in it; usually, the setting is not previously known in an intimate way. The ethnographer participates in the daily routines of this setting, develops ongoing relations with the people of it, and observes all the while what is going on. Indeed, the term “participant observation” is often used to characterize this basic research approach. But, second, the ethnographer writes down in regular, systematic ways what she observes and learns while participating in the daily rounds of life in others. Thus the researcher creates an accumulating written record of these observations and experiences (Emerson et al., 1995, p. 1).

Qualitative researchers, particularly those involved with fieldwork, may find a significant amount of meaning in artifacts, pictures, and other non-text items. Creswell (2003, p. 189) explains that qualitative researchers may

• Have participants take photographs or videotapes
• Examine physical trace evidence (e.g., footprints in the snow)
• Collect sounds
• Examine possessions or ritual objects to elicit views during an interview
• Collect smells, tastes, or sensations through touch.

Phenomenologists are driven by the quest to discover the objective and subjective reality of the phenomena being studied without the explicit objective of developing theory.

In phenomenological studies the investigator abstains from making suppositions, focuses on a specific topic freshly and naively, constructs a question or problem to guide the study, and derives findings that will provide the basis for further research and reflections. In phenomenological science a relationship always exists between the external perception of natural objects and internal perceptions, memories, and judgments (Moustakas, 1994, p. 47).

Qualitative research allows investigators to be dynamic and innovative. Qualitative methods evolve as new technologies and social forums emerge. For example, the Internet provides a good example of a qualitative methodology that would not have been possible in the early days of qualitative research – online research.

In technologically-mediated environments, self, other, and social structures are constituted through interaction, negotiated in concert with others. The extent to which information and communication technology (ICT) can mediate one’s identity and social relations should call us to epistemological attention. Whether or not we do research of physical or online cultures, new communication technologies highlight the dialogic features of social reality, compelling scholars to reexamine traditional assumptions and previously taken-for-granted rubrics of social research (Markham, 2004, p. 794).

The literature samples above illustrate the breadth of qualitative research. Qualitative data can be derived from many sources using numerous techniques and these data may facilitate insightful discoveries, but there is a price. Qualitative research is time consuming and the data are complex. Without thoughtful organization the researcher is likely to lose momentum and intellectual perspective. Without diligent project management qualitative researchers may forget critical data, spend far too much time looking for things they lost, and miss the most important themes that are embedded in their data.

At its core, this book is about the efficient organization and management of qualitative data using readily available tools. The researcher can more productively analyze data and write better conclusions if he or she intelligently uses the every-day technologies that have become available in the last few years. This book will help you complete your projects on time and with less frustration by introducing you to efficient qualitative research techniques and problem solving ideas.

This book is not the introduction of a new qualitative research method. For explanations of grounded theory, case studies, ethnography, phenomenology, focus groups, action research, online rese...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1: Introduction, coding terminology, and the big picture
• 2: Getting started – Planning your qualitative research project
• 3: Organizing and controlling your research
• 4: Backup your data
• 5: Collecting your data
• 6: Level 1 coding
• 7: Level 2 coding using Access
• 8: Level 2 coding using Excel
• 9: Level 3 and Level 4 (theoretical concepts) coding
• 10: Writing the report – The final draft
• Appendix - Microsoft Office basics
• Bibliography and references
• Index