Qualitative Research Design by Joseph A. Maxwell

Author:Joseph A. Maxwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781452285832
Publisher: Sage Publisher
Published: 2012-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

DECISIONS ABOUT DATA ANALYSIS

Analysis is often conceptually separated from design, especially by writers who see design as what happens before the data are actually collected. Here, I treat analysis as a part of design (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996, p. 6), and as something that must itself be designed. Any qualitative study requires decisions about how the analysis will be done, and these decisions should inform, and be informed by, the rest of the design. The discussion of data analysis is often the weakest part of a qualitative proposal; in extreme cases, it consists entirely of generalities and “boilerplate” language taken from methods texts, and gives little sense of how the analysis will actually be done, let alone why these strategies were chosen.

One of the most common problems in qualitative studies is letting your unanalyzed field notes and transcripts pile up, making the task of final analysis much more difficult and discouraging. There is a mountaineer’s adage that the experienced climber begins lunch immediately after finishing breakfast, and continues eating lunch as long as he or she is awake, stopping briefly to eat supper (Manning, 1960, p. 54). In the same way, the experienced qualitative researcher begins data analysis immediately after finishing the first interview or observation, and continues to analyze the data as long as he or she is working on the research, stopping briefly to write reports and papers. Bernd Heinrich’s (1984) rationale for immediately analyzing his biological data applies equally to the social sciences:

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