data analysis methods in qualitative research ppt

Monograph Matters

Qualitative analysis: process and examples | powerpoint – 85.2.

Authors Laura Wray-Lake and Laura Abrams describe qualitative data analysis, with illustrative examples from their SRCD monograph,  Pathways to Civic Engagement Among Urban Youth of Color . This PowerPoint document includes presenter notes, making it an ideal resource for researchers learning about qualitative analysis and for instructors teaching about it in upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses.

Created by Laura Wray-Lake and Laura S. Abrams. All rights reserved.

Citation: Wray-Lake, L. & Abrams, L. S. (2020) Qualitative Analysis: Process and Examples [PowerPoint]. Retrieved from https://monographmatters.srcd.org/2020/05/12/teachingresources-qualitativeanalysis-powerpoint-85-2

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Qualitative Data Analysis Methods 101:

The “big 6” methods + examples.

By: Kerryn Warren (PhD) | Reviewed By: Eunice Rautenbach (D.Tech) | May 2020 (Updated April 2023)

Qualitative data analysis methods. Wow, that’s a mouthful. 

If you’re new to the world of research, qualitative data analysis can look rather intimidating. So much bulky terminology and so many abstract, fluffy concepts. It certainly can be a minefield!

Don’t worry – in this post, we’ll unpack the most popular analysis methods , one at a time, so that you can approach your analysis with confidence and competence – whether that’s for a dissertation, thesis or really any kind of research project.

What (exactly) is qualitative data analysis?

To understand qualitative data analysis, we need to first understand qualitative data – so let’s step back and ask the question, “what exactly is qualitative data?”.

Qualitative data refers to pretty much any data that’s “not numbers” . In other words, it’s not the stuff you measure using a fixed scale or complex equipment, nor do you analyse it using complex statistics or mathematics.

So, if it’s not numbers, what is it?

Words, you guessed? Well… sometimes , yes. Qualitative data can, and often does, take the form of interview transcripts, documents and open-ended survey responses – but it can also involve the interpretation of images and videos. In other words, qualitative isn’t just limited to text-based data.

So, how’s that different from quantitative data, you ask?

Simply put, qualitative research focuses on words, descriptions, concepts or ideas – while quantitative research focuses on numbers and statistics . Qualitative research investigates the “softer side” of things to explore and describe , while quantitative research focuses on the “hard numbers”, to measure differences between variables and the relationships between them. If you’re keen to learn more about the differences between qual and quant, we’ve got a detailed post over here .

So, qualitative analysis is easier than quantitative, right?

Not quite. In many ways, qualitative data can be challenging and time-consuming to analyse and interpret. At the end of your data collection phase (which itself takes a lot of time), you’ll likely have many pages of text-based data or hours upon hours of audio to work through. You might also have subtle nuances of interactions or discussions that have danced around in your mind, or that you scribbled down in messy field notes. All of this needs to work its way into your analysis.

Making sense of all of this is no small task and you shouldn’t underestimate it. Long story short – qualitative analysis can be a lot of work! Of course, quantitative analysis is no piece of cake either, but it’s important to recognise that qualitative analysis still requires a significant investment in terms of time and effort.

Need a helping hand?

In this post, we’ll explore qualitative data analysis by looking at some of the most common analysis methods we encounter. We’re not going to cover every possible qualitative method and we’re not going to go into heavy detail – we’re just going to give you the big picture. That said, we will of course includes links to loads of extra resources so that you can learn more about whichever analysis method interests you.

Without further delay, let’s get into it.

The “Big 6” Qualitative Analysis Methods 

There are many different types of qualitative data analysis, all of which serve different purposes and have unique strengths and weaknesses . We’ll start by outlining the analysis methods and then we’ll dive into the details for each.

The 6 most popular methods (or at least the ones we see at Grad Coach) are:

• Content analysis
• Narrative analysis
• Discourse analysis
• Thematic analysis
• Grounded theory (GT)
• Interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA)

Let’s take a look at each of them…

QDA Method #1: Qualitative Content Analysis

Content analysis is possibly the most common and straightforward QDA method. At the simplest level, content analysis is used to evaluate patterns within a piece of content (for example, words, phrases or images) or across multiple pieces of content or sources of communication. For example, a collection of newspaper articles or political speeches.

With content analysis, you could, for instance, identify the frequency with which an idea is shared or spoken about – like the number of times a Kardashian is mentioned on Twitter. Or you could identify patterns of deeper underlying interpretations – for instance, by identifying phrases or words in tourist pamphlets that highlight India as an ancient country.

Because content analysis can be used in such a wide variety of ways, it’s important to go into your analysis with a very specific question and goal, or you’ll get lost in the fog. With content analysis, you’ll group large amounts of text into codes , summarise these into categories, and possibly even tabulate the data to calculate the frequency of certain concepts or variables. Because of this, content analysis provides a small splash of quantitative thinking within a qualitative method.

Naturally, while content analysis is widely useful, it’s not without its drawbacks . One of the main issues with content analysis is that it can be very time-consuming , as it requires lots of reading and re-reading of the texts. Also, because of its multidimensional focus on both qualitative and quantitative aspects, it is sometimes accused of losing important nuances in communication.

Content analysis also tends to concentrate on a very specific timeline and doesn’t take into account what happened before or after that timeline. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though – just something to be aware of. So, keep these factors in mind if you’re considering content analysis. Every analysis method has its limitations , so don’t be put off by these – just be aware of them ! If you’re interested in learning more about content analysis, the video below provides a good starting point.

QDA Method #2: Narrative Analysis 

As the name suggests, narrative analysis is all about listening to people telling stories and analysing what that means . Since stories serve a functional purpose of helping us make sense of the world, we can gain insights into the ways that people deal with and make sense of reality by analysing their stories and the ways they’re told.

You could, for example, use narrative analysis to explore whether how something is being said is important. For instance, the narrative of a prisoner trying to justify their crime could provide insight into their view of the world and the justice system. Similarly, analysing the ways entrepreneurs talk about the struggles in their careers or cancer patients telling stories of hope could provide powerful insights into their mindsets and perspectives . Simply put, narrative analysis is about paying attention to the stories that people tell – and more importantly, the way they tell them.

Of course, the narrative approach has its weaknesses , too. Sample sizes are generally quite small due to the time-consuming process of capturing narratives. Because of this, along with the multitude of social and lifestyle factors which can influence a subject, narrative analysis can be quite difficult to reproduce in subsequent research. This means that it’s difficult to test the findings of some of this research.

Similarly, researcher bias can have a strong influence on the results here, so you need to be particularly careful about the potential biases you can bring into your analysis when using this method. Nevertheless, narrative analysis is still a very useful qualitative analysis method – just keep these limitations in mind and be careful not to draw broad conclusions . If you’re keen to learn more about narrative analysis, the video below provides a great introduction to this qualitative analysis method.

QDA Method #3: Discourse Analysis 

Discourse is simply a fancy word for written or spoken language or debate . So, discourse analysis is all about analysing language within its social context. In other words, analysing language – such as a conversation, a speech, etc – within the culture and society it takes place. For example, you could analyse how a janitor speaks to a CEO, or how politicians speak about terrorism.

To truly understand these conversations or speeches, the culture and history of those involved in the communication are important factors to consider. For example, a janitor might speak more casually with a CEO in a company that emphasises equality among workers. Similarly, a politician might speak more about terrorism if there was a recent terrorist incident in the country.

So, as you can see, by using discourse analysis, you can identify how culture , history or power dynamics (to name a few) have an effect on the way concepts are spoken about. So, if your research aims and objectives involve understanding culture or power dynamics, discourse analysis can be a powerful method.

Because there are many social influences in terms of how we speak to each other, the potential use of discourse analysis is vast . Of course, this also means it’s important to have a very specific research question (or questions) in mind when analysing your data and looking for patterns and themes, or you might land up going down a winding rabbit hole.

Discourse analysis can also be very time-consuming  as you need to sample the data to the point of saturation – in other words, until no new information and insights emerge. But this is, of course, part of what makes discourse analysis such a powerful technique. So, keep these factors in mind when considering this QDA method. Again, if you’re keen to learn more, the video below presents a good starting point.

QDA Method #4: Thematic Analysis

Thematic analysis looks at patterns of meaning in a data set – for example, a set of interviews or focus group transcripts. But what exactly does that… mean? Well, a thematic analysis takes bodies of data (which are often quite large) and groups them according to similarities – in other words, themes . These themes help us make sense of the content and derive meaning from it.

Let’s take a look at an example.

With thematic analysis, you could analyse 100 online reviews of a popular sushi restaurant to find out what patrons think about the place. By reviewing the data, you would then identify the themes that crop up repeatedly within the data – for example, “fresh ingredients” or “friendly wait staff”.

So, as you can see, thematic analysis can be pretty useful for finding out about people’s experiences , views, and opinions . Therefore, if your research aims and objectives involve understanding people’s experience or view of something, thematic analysis can be a great choice.

Since thematic analysis is a bit of an exploratory process, it’s not unusual for your research questions to develop , or even change as you progress through the analysis. While this is somewhat natural in exploratory research, it can also be seen as a disadvantage as it means that data needs to be re-reviewed each time a research question is adjusted. In other words, thematic analysis can be quite time-consuming – but for a good reason. So, keep this in mind if you choose to use thematic analysis for your project and budget extra time for unexpected adjustments.

QDA Method #5: Grounded theory (GT) 

Grounded theory is a powerful qualitative analysis method where the intention is to create a new theory (or theories) using the data at hand, through a series of “ tests ” and “ revisions ”. Strictly speaking, GT is more a research design type than an analysis method, but we’ve included it here as it’s often referred to as a method.

What’s most important with grounded theory is that you go into the analysis with an open mind and let the data speak for itself – rather than dragging existing hypotheses or theories into your analysis. In other words, your analysis must develop from the ground up (hence the name). 

Let’s look at an example of GT in action.

Assume you’re interested in developing a theory about what factors influence students to watch a YouTube video about qualitative analysis. Using Grounded theory , you’d start with this general overarching question about the given population (i.e., graduate students). First, you’d approach a small sample – for example, five graduate students in a department at a university. Ideally, this sample would be reasonably representative of the broader population. You’d interview these students to identify what factors lead them to watch the video.

After analysing the interview data, a general pattern could emerge. For example, you might notice that graduate students are more likely to read a post about qualitative methods if they are just starting on their dissertation journey, or if they have an upcoming test about research methods.

From here, you’ll look for another small sample – for example, five more graduate students in a different department – and see whether this pattern holds true for them. If not, you’ll look for commonalities and adapt your theory accordingly. As this process continues, the theory would develop . As we mentioned earlier, what’s important with grounded theory is that the theory develops from the data – not from some preconceived idea.

So, what are the drawbacks of grounded theory? Well, some argue that there’s a tricky circularity to grounded theory. For it to work, in principle, you should know as little as possible regarding the research question and population, so that you reduce the bias in your interpretation. However, in many circumstances, it’s also thought to be unwise to approach a research question without knowledge of the current literature . In other words, it’s a bit of a “chicken or the egg” situation.

Regardless, grounded theory remains a popular (and powerful) option. Naturally, it’s a very useful method when you’re researching a topic that is completely new or has very little existing research about it, as it allows you to start from scratch and work your way from the ground up .

QDA Method #6:   Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)

Interpretive. Phenomenological. Analysis. IPA . Try saying that three times fast…

Let’s just stick with IPA, okay?

IPA is designed to help you understand the personal experiences of a subject (for example, a person or group of people) concerning a major life event, an experience or a situation . This event or experience is the “phenomenon” that makes up the “P” in IPA. Such phenomena may range from relatively common events – such as motherhood, or being involved in a car accident – to those which are extremely rare – for example, someone’s personal experience in a refugee camp. So, IPA is a great choice if your research involves analysing people’s personal experiences of something that happened to them.

It’s important to remember that IPA is subject – centred . In other words, it’s focused on the experiencer . This means that, while you’ll likely use a coding system to identify commonalities, it’s important not to lose the depth of experience or meaning by trying to reduce everything to codes. Also, keep in mind that since your sample size will generally be very small with IPA, you often won’t be able to draw broad conclusions about the generalisability of your findings. But that’s okay as long as it aligns with your research aims and objectives.

Another thing to be aware of with IPA is personal bias . While researcher bias can creep into all forms of research, self-awareness is critically important with IPA, as it can have a major impact on the results. For example, a researcher who was a victim of a crime himself could insert his own feelings of frustration and anger into the way he interprets the experience of someone who was kidnapped. So, if you’re going to undertake IPA, you need to be very self-aware or you could muddy the analysis.

How to choose the right analysis method

In light of all of the qualitative analysis methods we’ve covered so far, you’re probably asking yourself the question, “ How do I choose the right one? ”

Much like all the other methodological decisions you’ll need to make, selecting the right qualitative analysis method largely depends on your research aims, objectives and questions . In other words, the best tool for the job depends on what you’re trying to build. For example:

• Perhaps your research aims to analyse the use of words and what they reveal about the intention of the storyteller and the cultural context of the time.
• Perhaps your research aims to develop an understanding of the unique personal experiences of people that have experienced a certain event, or
• Perhaps your research aims to develop insight regarding the influence of a certain culture on its members.

As you can probably see, each of these research aims are distinctly different , and therefore different analysis methods would be suitable for each one. For example, narrative analysis would likely be a good option for the first aim, while grounded theory wouldn’t be as relevant. 

It’s also important to remember that each method has its own set of strengths, weaknesses and general limitations. No single analysis method is perfect . So, depending on the nature of your research, it may make sense to adopt more than one method (this is called triangulation ). Keep in mind though that this will of course be quite time-consuming.

As we’ve seen, all of the qualitative analysis methods we’ve discussed make use of coding and theme-generating techniques, but the intent and approach of each analysis method differ quite substantially. So, it’s very important to come into your research with a clear intention before you decide which analysis method (or methods) to use.

Start by reviewing your research aims , objectives and research questions to assess what exactly you’re trying to find out – then select a qualitative analysis method that fits. Never pick a method just because you like it or have experience using it – your analysis method (or methods) must align with your broader research aims and objectives.

Let’s recap on QDA methods…

In this post, we looked at six popular qualitative data analysis methods:

• First, we looked at content analysis , a straightforward method that blends a little bit of quant into a primarily qualitative analysis.
• Then we looked at narrative analysis , which is about analysing how stories are told.
• Next up was discourse analysis – which is about analysing conversations and interactions.
• Then we moved on to thematic analysis – which is about identifying themes and patterns.
• From there, we went south with grounded theory – which is about starting from scratch with a specific question and using the data alone to build a theory in response to that question.
• And finally, we looked at IPA – which is about understanding people’s unique experiences of a phenomenon.

Of course, these aren’t the only options when it comes to qualitative data analysis, but they’re a great starting point if you’re dipping your toes into qualitative research for the first time.

If you’re still feeling a bit confused, consider our private coaching service , where we hold your hand through the research process to help you develop your best work.

Psst... there’s more!

This post was based on one of our popular Research Bootcamps . If you're working on a research project, you'll definitely want to check this out ...

87 Comments

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Great to hear that. Good luck with your qualitative data analysis, Pramod!

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Precise explanation of method.

Hi, may we use 2 data analysis methods in our qualitative research?

Thanks for your comment. Most commonly, one would use one type of analysis method, but it depends on your research aims and objectives.

You explained it in very simple language, everyone can understand it. Thanks so much.

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Thank nicely explained can I ask is Qualitative content analysis the same as thematic analysis?

Thanks for your comment. No, QCA and thematic are two different types of analysis. This article might help clarify – https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nhs.12048

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i need a citation of your book.

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Hi Derek, What other theories/methods would you recommend when the data is a whole speech?

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What do we call a research data analysis method that one use to advise or determining the best accounting tool or techniques that should be adopted in a company.

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choosing a right method for a paper is always a hard job for a student, this is a useful information, but it would be more useful personally for me, if the author provide me with a little bit more information about the data analysis techniques in type of explanatory research. Can we use qualitative content analysis technique for explanatory research ? or what is the suitable data analysis method for explanatory research in social studies?

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Clear explanation on qualitative and how about Case study

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so educative…. but Ijust want to know which method is coding of the qualitative or tallying done?

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Is there a video the captures the practical process of coding using automated applications?

Thanks for the comment. We don’t recommend using automated applications for coding, as they are not sufficiently accurate in our experience.

content analysis can be qualitative research?

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Thank you very much for such a wonderful content

do you have any material on Data collection

What a powerful explanation of the QDA methods. Thank you.

Great explanation both written and Video. i have been using of it on a day to day working of my thesis project in accounting and finance. Thank you very much for your support.

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This is an eye opener for me and very informative, I have used some of your guidance notes on my Thesis, I wonder if you can assist with your 1. name of your book, year of publication, topic etc., this is for citing in my Bibliography,

I certainly hope to hear from you

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Qualitative Data Analysis

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Qualitative Data Analysis. Chapter 11, Research Methods for Public Administrators Dr. Gail Johnson Revised & expanded for PADM 522, Designing Applied Research Dr. Mario Rivera. Analyzing Qualitative Data. A process of making sense of non-numeric data. Data from:

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• qualitative data
• program evaluation
• coding scheme

qualitative data analysis

• practical program evaluation assessing

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Qualitative Data Analysis Chapter 11, Research Methods for Public Administrators Dr. Gail Johnson Revised & expanded for PADM 522, Designing Applied Research Dr. Mario Rivera Dr. G. Johnson, www.ResearchDemystified.org

Analyzing Qualitative Data A process of making sense of non-numeric data. Data from: • Narrative documents (speeches, newspapers, diaries, reports, etc) • Open-ended interviews • Open-ended questions on a survey • Case study (as the principal method or as embedded in a larger complex of qualitative data and forms of analysis). • Often, qualitative evaluation research incorporates cross-case analysis: For instance in evaluating two sites of the same program, or in assessing a program site against another without the intervention. An example might be a school with an extended learning program to others without it. Dr. G. Johnson, with additional material by Dr. M. Rivera

Qualitative Data Analysis Data From • Focus groups transcripts; interview transcripts and notes • Unstructured observations • Document review • Videos, etc. The goal is to identify common themes • Requires a solid plan, attention to detail, good organization and sufficient time • Whether the analysis is done by computer or by hand, it is often necessary to develop a coding scheme so the data can be systematically organized and analyzed • Computer software can help locate and organize data according to the coding scheme created Dr. G. Johnson & Dr. M. Rivera

Qualitative Data Analysis • But the analysis—that is, making sense of the data, discovering the story the data reveals—is done by the researcher(s) • The greatest concern is bias/paradigm blinders: hard to recognize things you do not expect, or to avoid finding things you are inclined to find. • Maintaining the Thread • Review the data, make notes as you go along • Read again once all the data collection is completed • Organize the data—according to research questions, by date, by geographic location—what makes sense given the situation • Begin to look for recurrent themes. In one cross-case evaluation of a family-based drug education program, for instance, the instructor (Rivera) found clear commonalities and divergences in program-development in two Navajo communities in New Mexico. Dr. G. Johnson, Dr. M. Rivera

Basic Activities: Preliminary Analysis • Identify common words, ideas, themes • Develop spreadsheet or write on index cards • Identify “quotable quotes”—that is, quotes that highlight the key issues: general views, divergent views, a range views. In evaluating an afterschool science program for middle-school students, Dr. Rivera conducted short interviews with students and with their parents, on various occasions. These exchanges produced quotes pertaining to favorite and least favorite parts of the program, parents’ views on program impact on students, etc. In another program evaluation, short quotations from participants supplemented survey results. Dr. G. Johnson, Dr. M. Rivera

Qualitative Data Analysis: Coding Process • When applicable (focus groups, content analysis of documents), code the data • Identify common word, issues, themes and go through the material and label them according to that coding scheme • You may go through the material several times • Sometimes a major theme emerges at the end and you will need to go back through to see if it was present in the earlier data • Software is available that may help. Major software are ATLAS.ti and NUD*IST, others like NVivo are specialized for various uses. There is growing literature on the use of computer- assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS). • Researchers might also use spreadsheets, index cards, color coding of documents, or other devices or combinations of these. Dr. G. Johnson, Dr. M. Rivera

Ensuring Quality in Qualitative Analysis • Work to ensure inter-rater reliability • Like content analysis, the researchers should review the same material and apply the coding scheme • Then review and determine if there are difference • Discuss, revise the coding scheme if necessary and retrain the coders • Repeat this test until there is agreement in the coding • Compare results, work out differences, then code all the material • Inter-rater reliability was a major concern in the assessment of teacher dossiers for advancement in tier, in Dr. Rivera’s evaluation of Three-tier Teacher Licensure in New Mexico in 2003-2004. Several trial (but real) assessments of dossiers by 3-person rater teams, of teacher volunteering to be thus evaluated, were tried during 2004-05, a transitional year for the new system. Dr. G. Johnson, Dr. Mario Rivera

Qualitative Data Analysis: General Process • Interpreting the data • Making sense of the data: Review salient themes • Are there any seeming relationships between the themes or characteristics? • What are the major points that emerge from the analysis? • What about minor points? • Sometimes an uncommon theme stands out, or is noted by one or two investigators • The researchers need to consider that perspective; always indicate when it is a minority view and be careful that it does not trump majority views • When evaluating programs, principal investigators and program managers are often engaged in conjoint analysis by or with the evaluator. Eliciting a variety of views is important. • These are stakeholders, and stakeholders, when really engaged, make us smarter. Cf. Chen on “stakeholder validity” vs. scientific validity.* *Chen, H. (2005). Practical program evaluation: Assessing and improving planning, implementation, and effectiveness. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

One stakeholder engagement technique: the Affinity Diagram • A group process for analyzing qualitative data: • Research team reviews the material • In silence, write down each idea, key work theme on a sticky note • In silence, post on wall • In silence, sort into similar categories • Once the notes are organized, discuss; look for consensus themes • Interpret the data with stakeholders • Reality check: do others involved in program or project agree? • Share preliminary drafts with stakeholders or a small group of the participants to explore the issues you have discovered • Share final draft with experts and cold readers

Affinity Diagram • Identify common themes • The Affinity Diagram tool is a quick way to set up a coding framework • It is also a great way to identify the major themes and topics in the final article or report • It has the advantage of capturing all ideas in a room • Everyone’s ideas have equal value when posted • Focus on major themes: • “Some said X, while others said Y . . .” • Avoid generalizations: if not everyone was asked to comment about a particular practice, you do not know if the five who commented represented the views of others or were just the only ones that thought this practice was important.

Leading Discussion and Writing Up Results—Could function as a facilitated focus group • Provide a range of perspectives. • Highlight interesting perspectives even if only said by one or two people. • A few offered unique views: “….” • These might be important because “…..” • Do not try to report numbers or percents unless everyone was counted in exactly the same way • For example, 10 people out of the 20 who you interviewed commented that they liked the training program. • But unless you asked all 20 people, you do not know what the other 10 people thought. Dr. G. Johnson, Dr. Mario Rivera

Limitations of Qualitative Data Analysis • It can be like a Rorschach test –an inkblot that some see as a butterfly and others see as maple leaf • Reasonable people can read the same material and have very different interpretations. It is important to explore those differences to gain a deeper understanding rather than to win the argument • It is much more difficult to generalize from qualitative analysis than otherwise. Questions of validity, reliability, replicability, etc., inevitably arise with qualitative data. These may be overweighed by the richness of insight gleaned from the data (“thick description”), but these challenges need to be taken into account and addressed with some directness in research reports. • Best when combined with quantitative analysis in mixed-methods research, which allows for triangulation of data and methods alike.

Creative Commons • This PowerPoint is meant to be used and shared with attribution • Please provide feedback • If you make changes, please share freely and send me a copy of changes: • [email protected] • Visit www.creativecommons.org for more information Dr. G. Johnson, www.ResearchDemystified.org

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Qualitative Data Analysis: What is it, Methods + Examples

In a world rich with information and narrative, understanding the deeper layers of human experiences requires a unique vision that goes beyond numbers and figures. This is where the power of qualitative data analysis comes to light.

In this blog, we’ll learn about qualitative data analysis, explore its methods, and provide real-life examples showcasing its power in uncovering insights.

What is Qualitative Data Analysis?

Qualitative data analysis is a systematic process of examining non-numerical data to extract meaning, patterns, and insights.

In contrast to quantitative analysis, which focuses on numbers and statistical metrics, the qualitative study focuses on the qualitative aspects of data, such as text, images, audio, and videos. It seeks to understand every aspect of human experiences, perceptions, and behaviors by examining the data’s richness.

Companies frequently conduct this analysis on customer feedback. You can collect qualitative data from reviews, complaints, chat messages, interactions with support centers, customer interviews, case notes, or even social media comments. This kind of data holds the key to understanding customer sentiments and preferences in a way that goes beyond mere numbers.

Importance of Qualitative Data Analysis

Qualitative data analysis plays a crucial role in your research and decision-making process across various disciplines. Let’s explore some key reasons that underline the significance of this analysis:

In-Depth Understanding

It enables you to explore complex and nuanced aspects of a phenomenon, delving into the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. This method provides you with a deeper understanding of human behavior, experiences, and contexts that quantitative approaches might not capture fully.

Contextual Insight

You can use this analysis to give context to numerical data. It will help you understand the circumstances and conditions that influence participants’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. This contextual insight becomes essential for generating comprehensive explanations.

Theory Development

You can generate or refine hypotheses via qualitative data analysis. As you analyze the data attentively, you can form hypotheses, concepts, and frameworks that will drive your future research and contribute to theoretical advances.

Participant Perspectives

When performing qualitative research, you can highlight participant voices and opinions. This approach is especially useful for understanding marginalized or underrepresented people, as it allows them to communicate their experiences and points of view.

Exploratory Research

The analysis is frequently used at the exploratory stage of your project. It assists you in identifying important variables, developing research questions, and designing quantitative studies that will follow.

Types of Qualitative Data

When conducting qualitative research, you can use several qualitative data collection methods , and here you will come across many sorts of qualitative data that can provide you with unique insights into your study topic. These data kinds add new views and angles to your understanding and analysis.

Interviews and Focus Groups

Interviews and focus groups will be among your key methods for gathering qualitative data. Interviews are one-on-one talks in which participants can freely share their thoughts, experiences, and opinions.

Focus groups, on the other hand, are discussions in which members interact with one another, resulting in dynamic exchanges of ideas. Both methods provide rich qualitative data and direct access to participant perspectives.

Observations and Field Notes

Observations and field notes are another useful sort of qualitative data. You can immerse yourself in the research environment through direct observation, carefully documenting behaviors, interactions, and contextual factors.

These observations will be recorded in your field notes, providing a complete picture of the environment and the behaviors you’re researching. This data type is especially important for comprehending behavior in their natural setting.

Textual and Visual Data

Textual and visual data include a wide range of resources that can be qualitatively analyzed. Documents, written narratives, and transcripts from various sources, such as interviews or speeches, are examples of textual data.

Photographs, films, and even artwork provide a visual layer to your research. These forms of data allow you to investigate what is spoken and the underlying emotions, details, and symbols expressed by language or pictures.

When to Choose Qualitative Data Analysis over Quantitative Data Analysis

As you begin your research journey, understanding why the analysis of qualitative data is important will guide your approach to understanding complex events. If you analyze qualitative data, it will provide new insights that complement quantitative methodologies, which will give you a broader understanding of your study topic.

It is critical to know when to use qualitative analysis over quantitative procedures. You can prefer qualitative data analysis when:

• Complexity Reigns: When your research questions involve deep human experiences, motivations, or emotions, qualitative research excels at revealing these complexities.
• Exploration is Key: Qualitative analysis is ideal for exploratory research. It will assist you in understanding a new or poorly understood topic before formulating quantitative hypotheses.
• Context Matters: If you want to understand how context affects behaviors or results, qualitative data analysis provides the depth needed to grasp these relationships.
• Unanticipated Findings: When your study provides surprising new viewpoints or ideas, qualitative analysis helps you to delve deeply into these emerging themes.
• Subjective Interpretation is Vital: When it comes to understanding people’s subjective experiences and interpretations, qualitative data analysis is the way to go.

You can make informed decisions regarding the right approach for your research objectives if you understand the importance of qualitative analysis and recognize the situations where it shines.

Qualitative Data Analysis Methods and Examples

Exploring various qualitative data analysis methods will provide you with a wide collection for making sense of your research findings. Once the data has been collected, you can choose from several analysis methods based on your research objectives and the data type you’ve collected.

There are five main methods for analyzing qualitative data. Each method takes a distinct approach to identifying patterns, themes, and insights within your qualitative data. They are:

Method 1: Content Analysis

Content analysis is a methodical technique for analyzing textual or visual data in a structured manner. In this method, you will categorize qualitative data by splitting it into manageable pieces and assigning the manual coding process to these units.

As you go, you’ll notice ongoing codes and designs that will allow you to conclude the content. This method is very beneficial for detecting common ideas, concepts, or themes in your data without losing the context.

Steps to Do Content Analysis

Follow these steps when conducting content analysis:

• Collect and Immerse: Begin by collecting the necessary textual or visual data. Immerse yourself in this data to fully understand its content, context, and complexities.
• Assign Codes and Categories: Assign codes to relevant data sections that systematically represent major ideas or themes. Arrange comparable codes into groups that cover the major themes.
• Analyze and Interpret: Develop a structured framework from the categories and codes. Then, evaluate the data in the context of your research question, investigate relationships between categories, discover patterns, and draw meaning from these connections.

Benefits & Challenges

There are various advantages to using content analysis:

• Structured Approach: It offers a systematic approach to dealing with large data sets and ensures consistency throughout the research.
• Objective Insights: This method promotes objectivity, which helps to reduce potential biases in your study.
• Pattern Discovery: Content analysis can help uncover hidden trends, themes, and patterns that are not always obvious.
• Versatility: You can apply content analysis to various data formats, including text, internet content, images, etc.

However, keep in mind the challenges that arise:

• Subjectivity: Even with the best attempts, a certain bias may remain in coding and interpretation.
• Complexity: Analyzing huge data sets requires time and great attention to detail.
• Contextual Nuances: Content analysis may not capture all of the contextual richness that qualitative data analysis highlights.

Example of Content Analysis

Suppose you’re conducting market research and looking at customer feedback on a product. As you collect relevant data and analyze feedback, you’ll see repeating codes like “price,” “quality,” “customer service,” and “features.” These codes are organized into categories such as “positive reviews,” “negative reviews,” and “suggestions for improvement.”

According to your findings, themes such as “price” and “customer service” stand out and show that pricing and customer service greatly impact customer satisfaction. This example highlights the power of content analysis for obtaining significant insights from large textual data collections.

Method 2: Thematic Analysis

Thematic analysis is a well-structured procedure for identifying and analyzing recurring themes in your data. As you become more engaged in the data, you’ll generate codes or short labels representing key concepts. These codes are then organized into themes, providing a consistent framework for organizing and comprehending the substance of the data.

The analysis allows you to organize complex narratives and perspectives into meaningful categories, which will allow you to identify connections and patterns that may not be visible at first.

Steps to Do Thematic Analysis

Follow these steps when conducting a thematic analysis:

• Code and Group: Start by thoroughly examining the data and giving initial codes that identify the segments. To create initial themes, combine relevant codes.
• Code and Group: Begin by engaging yourself in the data, assigning first codes to notable segments. To construct basic themes, group comparable codes together.
• Analyze and Report: Analyze the data within each theme to derive relevant insights. Organize the topics into a consistent structure and explain your findings, along with data extracts that represent each theme.

Thematic analysis has various benefits:

• Structured Exploration: It is a method for identifying patterns and themes in complex qualitative data.
• Comprehensive knowledge: Thematic analysis promotes an in-depth understanding of the complications and meanings of the data.
• Application Flexibility: This method can be customized to various research situations and data kinds.

However, challenges may arise, such as:

• Interpretive Nature: Interpreting qualitative data in thematic analysis is vital, and it is critical to manage researcher bias.
• Time-consuming: The study can be time-consuming, especially with large data sets.
• Subjectivity: The selection of codes and topics might be subjective.

Example of Thematic Analysis

Assume you’re conducting a thematic analysis on job satisfaction interviews. Following your immersion in the data, you assign initial codes such as “work-life balance,” “career growth,” and “colleague relationships.” As you organize these codes, you’ll notice themes develop, such as “Factors Influencing Job Satisfaction” and “Impact on Work Engagement.”

Further investigation reveals the tales and experiences included within these themes and provides insights into how various elements influence job satisfaction. This example demonstrates how thematic analysis can reveal meaningful patterns and insights in qualitative data.

Method 3: Narrative Analysis

The narrative analysis involves the narratives that people share. You’ll investigate the histories in your data, looking at how stories are created and the meanings they express. This method is excellent for learning how people make sense of their experiences through narrative.

Steps to Do Narrative Analysis

The following steps are involved in narrative analysis:

• Gather and Analyze: Start by collecting narratives, such as first-person tales, interviews, or written accounts. Analyze the stories, focusing on the plot, feelings, and characters.
• Find Themes: Look for recurring themes or patterns in various narratives. Think about the similarities and differences between these topics and personal experiences.
• Interpret and Extract Insights: Contextualize the narratives within their larger context. Accept the subjective nature of each narrative and analyze the narrator’s voice and style. Extract insights from the tales by diving into the emotions, motivations, and implications communicated by the stories.

There are various advantages to narrative analysis:

• Deep Exploration: It lets you look deeply into people’s personal experiences and perspectives.
• Human-Centered: This method prioritizes the human perspective, allowing individuals to express themselves.

However, difficulties may arise, such as:

• Interpretive Complexity: Analyzing narratives requires dealing with the complexities of meaning and interpretation.
• Time-consuming: Because of the richness and complexities of tales, working with them can be time-consuming.

Example of Narrative Analysis

Assume you’re conducting narrative analysis on refugee interviews. As you read the stories, you’ll notice common themes of toughness, loss, and hope. The narratives provide insight into the obstacles that refugees face, their strengths, and the dreams that guide them.

The analysis can provide a deeper insight into the refugees’ experiences and the broader social context they navigate by examining the narratives’ emotional subtleties and underlying meanings. This example highlights how narrative analysis can reveal important insights into human stories.

Method 4: Grounded Theory Analysis

Grounded theory analysis is an iterative and systematic approach that allows you to create theories directly from data without being limited by pre-existing hypotheses. With an open mind, you collect data and generate early codes and labels that capture essential ideas or concepts within the data.

As you progress, you refine these codes and increasingly connect them, eventually developing a theory based on the data. Grounded theory analysis is a dynamic process for developing new insights and hypotheses based on details in your data.

Steps to Do Grounded Theory Analysis

Grounded theory analysis requires the following steps:

• Initial Coding: First, immerse yourself in the data, producing initial codes that represent major concepts or patterns.
• Categorize and Connect: Using axial coding, organize the initial codes, which establish relationships and connections between topics.
• Build the Theory: Focus on creating a core category that connects the codes and themes. Regularly refine the theory by comparing and integrating new data, ensuring that it evolves organically from the data.

Grounded theory analysis has various benefits:

• Theory Generation: It provides a one-of-a-kind opportunity to generate hypotheses straight from data and promotes new insights.
• In-depth Understanding: The analysis allows you to deeply analyze the data and reveal complex relationships and patterns.
• Flexible Process: This method is customizable and ongoing, which allows you to enhance your research as you collect additional data.

However, challenges might arise with:

• Time and Resources: Because grounded theory analysis is a continuous process, it requires a large commitment of time and resources.
• Theoretical Development: Creating a grounded theory involves a thorough understanding of qualitative data analysis software and theoretical concepts.
• Interpretation of Complexity: Interpreting and incorporating a newly developed theory into existing literature can be intellectually hard.

Example of Grounded Theory Analysis

Assume you’re performing a grounded theory analysis on workplace collaboration interviews. As you open code the data, you will discover notions such as “communication barriers,” “team dynamics,” and “leadership roles.” Axial coding demonstrates links between these notions, emphasizing the significance of efficient communication in developing collaboration.

You create the core “Integrated Communication Strategies” category through selective coding, which unifies new topics.

This theory-driven category serves as the framework for understanding how numerous aspects contribute to effective team collaboration. This example shows how grounded theory analysis allows you to generate a theory directly from the inherent nature of the data.

Method 5: Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis focuses on language and communication. You’ll look at how language produces meaning and how it reflects power relations, identities, and cultural influences. This strategy examines what is said and how it is said; the words, phrasing, and larger context of communication.

The analysis is precious when investigating power dynamics, identities, and cultural influences encoded in language. By evaluating the language used in your data, you can identify underlying assumptions, cultural standards, and how individuals negotiate meaning through communication.

Steps to Do Discourse Analysis

Conducting discourse analysis entails the following steps:

• Select Discourse: For analysis, choose language-based data such as texts, speeches, or media content.
• Analyze Language: Immerse yourself in the conversation, examining language choices, metaphors, and underlying assumptions.
• Discover Patterns: Recognize the dialogue’s reoccurring themes, ideologies, and power dynamics. To fully understand the effects of these patterns, put them in their larger context.

There are various advantages of using discourse analysis:

• Understanding Language: It provides an extensive understanding of how language builds meaning and influences perceptions.
• Uncovering Power Dynamics: The analysis reveals how power dynamics appear via language.
• Cultural Insights: This method identifies cultural norms, beliefs, and ideologies stored in communication.

However, the following challenges may arise:

• Complexity of Interpretation: Language analysis involves navigating multiple levels of nuance and interpretation.
• Subjectivity: Interpretation can be subjective, so controlling researcher bias is important.
• Time-Intensive: Discourse analysis can take a lot of time because careful linguistic study is required in this analysis.

Example of Discourse Analysis

Consider doing discourse analysis on media coverage of a political event. You notice repeating linguistic patterns in news articles that depict the event as a conflict between opposing parties. Through deconstruction, you can expose how this framing supports particular ideologies and power relations.

You can illustrate how language choices influence public perceptions and contribute to building the narrative around the event by analyzing the speech within the broader political and social context. This example shows how discourse analysis can reveal hidden power dynamics and cultural influences on communication.

How to do Qualitative Data Analysis with the QuestionPro Research suite?

QuestionPro is a popular survey and research platform that offers tools for collecting and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data. Follow these general steps for conducting qualitative data analysis using the QuestionPro Research Suite:

• Collect Qualitative Data: Set up your survey to capture qualitative responses. It might involve open-ended questions, text boxes, or comment sections where participants can provide detailed responses.
• Export Qualitative Responses: Export the responses once you’ve collected qualitative data through your survey. QuestionPro typically allows you to export survey data in various formats, such as Excel or CSV.
• Prepare Data for Analysis: Review the exported data and clean it if necessary. Remove irrelevant or duplicate entries to ensure your data is ready for analysis.
• Code and Categorize Responses: Segment and label data, letting new patterns emerge naturally, then develop categories through axial coding to structure the analysis.
• Identify Themes: Analyze the coded responses to identify recurring themes, patterns, and insights. Look for similarities and differences in participants’ responses.
• Generate Reports and Visualizations: Utilize the reporting features of QuestionPro to create visualizations, charts, and graphs that help communicate the themes and findings from your qualitative research.
• Interpret and Draw Conclusions: Interpret the themes and patterns you’ve identified in the qualitative data. Consider how these findings answer your research questions or provide insights into your study topic.
• Integrate with Quantitative Data (if applicable): If you’re also conducting quantitative research using QuestionPro, consider integrating your qualitative findings with quantitative results to provide a more comprehensive understanding.

Qualitative data analysis is vital in uncovering various human experiences, views, and stories. If you’re ready to transform your research journey and apply the power of qualitative analysis, now is the moment to do it. Book a demo with QuestionPro today and begin your journey of exploration.

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Chapter 20. Presentations

Introduction.

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a qualitative study is conducted, but it is not presented (in words or text), did it really happen? Perhaps not. Findings from qualitative research are inextricably tied up with the way those findings are presented. These presentations do not always need to be in writing, but they need to happen. Think of ethnographies, for example, and their thick descriptions of a particular culture. Witnessing a culture, taking fieldnotes, talking to people—none of those things in and of themselves convey the culture. Or think about an interview-based phenomenological study. Boxes of interview transcripts might be interesting to read through, but they are not a completed study without the intervention of hours of analysis and careful selection of exemplary quotes to illustrate key themes and final arguments and theories. And unlike much quantitative research in the social sciences, where the final write-up neatly reports the results of analyses, the way the “write-up” happens is an integral part of the analysis in qualitative research. Once again, we come back to the messiness and stubborn unlinearity of qualitative research. From the very beginning, when designing the study, imagining the form of its ultimate presentation is helpful.

Because qualitative researchers are motivated by understanding and conveying meaning, effective communication is not only an essential skill but a fundamental facet of the entire research project. Ethnographers must be able to convey a certain sense of verisimilitude, the appearance of true reality. Those employing interviews must faithfully depict the key meanings of the people they interviewed in a way that rings true to those people, even if the end result surprises them. And all researchers must strive for clarity in their publications so that various audiences can understand what was found and why it is important. This chapter will address how to organize various kinds of presentations for different audiences so that your results can be appreciated and understood.

In the world of academic science, social or otherwise, the primary audience for a study’s results is usually the academic community, and the primary venue for communicating to this audience is the academic journal. Journal articles are typically fifteen to thirty pages in length (8,000 to 12,000 words). Although qualitative researchers often write and publish journal articles—indeed, there are several journals dedicated entirely to qualitative research [1] —the best writing by qualitative researchers often shows up in books. This is because books, running from 80,000 to 150,000 words in length, allow the researcher to develop the material fully. You have probably read some of these in various courses you have taken, not realizing what they are. I have used examples of such books throughout this text, beginning with the three profiles in the introductory chapter. In some instances, the chapters in these books began as articles in academic journals (another indication that the journal article format somewhat limits what can be said about the study overall).

While the article and the book are “final” products of qualitative research, there are actually a few other presentation formats that are used along the way. At the very beginning of a research study, it is often important to have a written research proposal not just to clarify to yourself what you will be doing and when but also to justify your research to an outside agency, such as an institutional review board (IRB; see chapter 12), or to a potential funder, which might be your home institution, a government funder (such as the National Science Foundation, or NSF), or a private foundation (such as the Gates Foundation). As you get your research underway, opportunities will arise to present preliminary findings to audiences, usually through presentations at academic conferences. These presentations can provide important feedback as you complete your analyses. Finally, if you are completing a degree and looking to find an academic job, you will be asked to provide a “job talk,” usually about your research. These job talks are similar to conference presentations but can run significantly longer.

All the presentations mentioned so far are (mostly) for academic audiences. But qualitative research is also unique in that many of its practitioners don’t want to confine their presentation only to other academics. Qualitative researchers who study particular contexts or cultures might want to report back to the people and places they observed. Those working in the critical tradition might want to raise awareness of a particular issue to as large an audience as possible. Many others simply want everyday, nonacademic people to read their work, because they think it is interesting and important. To reach a wide audience, the final product can look like almost anything—it can be a poem, a blog, a podcast, even a science fiction short story. And if you are very lucky, it can even be a national or international bestseller.

In this chapter, we are going to stick with the more basic quotidian presentations—the academic paper / research proposal, the conference slideshow presentation / job talk, and the conference poster. We’ll also spend a bit of time on incorporating universal design into your presentations and how to create some especially attractive and impactful visual displays.

Researcher Note

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given about conducting qualitative research?

The best advice I’ve received came from my adviser, Alford Young Jr. He told me to find the “Jessi Streib” answer to my research question, not the “Pierre Bourdieu” answer to my research question. In other words, don’t just say how a famous theorist would answer your question; say something original, something coming from you.

—Jessi Streib, author of The Power of the Past and Privilege Lost 

Writing about Your Research

The journal article and the research proposal.

Although the research proposal is written before you have actually done your research and the article is written after all data collection and analysis is complete, there are actually many similarities between the two in terms of organization and purpose. The final article will (probably—depends on how much the research question and focus have shifted during the research itself) incorporate a great deal of what was included in a preliminary research proposal. The average lengths of both a proposal and an article are quite similar, with the “front sections” of the article abbreviated to make space for the findings, discussion of findings, and conclusion.

Figure 20.1 shows one model for what to include in an article or research proposal, comparing the elements of each with a default word count for each section. Please note that you will want to follow whatever specific guidelines you have been provided by the venue you are submitting the article/proposal to: the IRB, the NSF, the Journal of Qualitative Research . In fact, I encourage you to adapt the default model as needed by swapping out expected word counts for each section and adding or varying the sections to match expectations for your particular publication venue. [2]

You will notice a few things about the default model guidelines. First, while half of the proposal is spent discussing the research design, this section is shortened (but still included) for the article. There are a few elements that only show up in the proposal (e.g., the limitations section is in the introductory section here—it will be more fully developed in the conclusory section in the article). Obviously, you don’t have findings in the proposal, so this is an entirely new section for the article. Note that the article does not include a data management plan or a timeline—two aspects that most proposals require.

It might be helpful to find and maintain examples of successfully written sections that you can use as models for your own writing. I have included a few of these throughout the textbook and have included a few more at the end of this chapter.

Make an Argument

Some qualitative researchers, particularly those engaged in deep ethnographic research, focus their attention primarily if not exclusively on describing the data. They might even eschew the notion that they should make an “argument” about the data, preferring instead to use thick descriptions to convey interpretations. Bracketing the contrast between interpretation and argument for the moment, most readers will expect you to provide an argument about your data, and this argument will be in answer to whatever research question you eventually articulate (remember, research questions are allowed to shift as you get further into data collection and analysis). It can be frustrating to read a well-developed study with clear and elegant descriptions and no argument. The argument is the point of the research, and if you do not have one, 99 percent of the time, you are not finished with your analysis. Calarco ( 2020 ) suggests you imagine a pyramid, with all of your data forming the basis and all of your findings forming the middle section; the top/point of the pyramid is your argument, “what the patterns in your data tell us about how the world works or ought to work” ( 181 ).

The academic community to which you belong will be looking for an argument that relates to or develops theory. This is the theoretical generalizability promise of qualitative research. An academic audience will want to know how your findings relate to previous findings, theories, and concepts (the literature review; see chapter 9). It is thus vitally important that you go back to your literature review (or develop a new one) and draw those connections in your discussion and/or conclusion. When writing to other audiences, you will still want an argument, although it may not be written as a theoretical one. What do I mean by that? Even if you are not referring to previous literature or developing new theories or adapting older ones, a simple description of your findings is like dumping a lot of leaves in the lap of your audience. They still deserve to know about the shape of the forest. Maybe provide them a road map through it. Do this by telling a clear and cogent story about the data. What is the primary theme, and why is it important? What is the point of your research? [3]

A beautifully written piece of research based on participant observation [and/or] interviews brings people to life, and helps the reader understand the challenges people face. You are trying to use vivid, detailed and compelling words to help the reader really understand the lives of the people you studied. And you are trying to connect the lived experiences of these people to a broader conceptual point—so that the reader can understand why it matters. ( Lareau 2021:259 )

Do not hide your argument. Make it the focal point of your introductory section, and repeat it as often as needed to ensure the reader remembers it. I am always impressed when I see researchers do this well (see, e.g., Zelizer 1996 ).

Here are a few other suggestions for writing your article: Be brief. Do not overwhelm the reader with too many words; make every word count. Academics are particularly prone to “overwriting” as a way of demonstrating proficiency. Don’t. When writing your methods section, think about it as a “recipe for your work” that allows other researchers to replicate if they so wish ( Calarco 2020:186 ). Convey all the necessary information clearly, succinctly, and accurately. No more, no less. [4] Do not try to write from “beginning to end” in that order. Certain sections, like the introductory section, may be the last ones you write. I find the methods section the easiest, so I often begin there. Calarco ( 2020 ) begins with an outline of the analysis and results section and then works backward from there to outline the contribution she is making, then the full introduction that serves as a road map for the writing of all sections. She leaves the abstract for the very end. Find what order best works for you.

Presenting at Conferences and Job Talks

Students and faculty are primarily called upon to publicly present their research in two distinct contexts—the academic conference and the “job talk.” By convention, conference presentations usually run about fifteen minutes and, at least in sociology and other social sciences, rely primarily on the use of a slideshow (PowerPoint Presentation or PPT) presentation. You are usually one of three or four presenters scheduled on the same “panel,” so it is an important point of etiquette to ensure that your presentation falls within the allotted time and does not crowd into that of the other presenters. Job talks, on the other hand, conventionally require a forty- to forty-five-minute presentation with a fifteen- to twenty-minute question and answer (Q&A) session following it. You are the only person presenting, so if you run over your allotted time, it means less time for the Q&A, which can disturb some audience members who have been waiting for a chance to ask you something. It is sometimes possible to incorporate questions during your presentation, which allows you to take the entire hour, but you might end up shorting your presentation this way if the questions are numerous. It’s best for beginners to stick to the “ask me at the end” format (unless there is a simple clarifying question that can easily be addressed and makes the presentation run more smoothly, as in the case where you simply forgot to include information on the number of interviews you conducted).

For slideshows, you should allot two or even three minutes for each slide, never less than one minute. And those slides should be clear, concise, and limited. Most of what you say should not be on those slides at all. The slides are simply the main points or a clear image of what you are speaking about. Include bulleted points (words, short phrases), not full sentences. The exception is illustrative quotations from transcripts or fieldnotes. In those cases, keep to one illustrative quote per slide, and if it is long, bold or otherwise, highlight the words or passages that are most important for the audience to notice. [5]

Figure 20.2 provides a possible model for sections to include in either a conference presentation or a job talk, with approximate times and approximate numbers of slides. Note the importance (in amount of time spent) of both the research design and the findings/results sections, both of which have been helpfully starred for you. Although you don’t want to short any of the sections, these two sections are the heart of your presentation.

Fig 20.2. Suggested Slideshow Times and Number of Slides

Should you write out your script to read along with your presentation? I have seen this work well, as it prevents presenters from straying off topic and keeps them to the time allotted. On the other hand, these presentations can seem stiff and wooden. Personally, although I have a general script in advance, I like to speak a little more informally and engagingly with each slide, sometimes making connections with previous panelists if I am at a conference. This means I have to pay attention to the time, and I sometimes end up breezing through one section more quickly than I would like. Whatever approach you take, practice in advance. Many times. With an audience. Ask for feedback, and pay attention to any presentation issues that arise (e.g., Do you speak too fast? Are you hard to hear? Do you stumble over a particular word or name?).

Even though there are rules and guidelines for what to include, you will still want to make your presentation as engaging as possible in the little amount of time you have. Calarco ( 2020:274 ) recommends trying one of three story structures to frame your presentation: (1) the uncertain explanation , where you introduce a phenomenon that has not yet been fully explained and then describe how your research is tackling this; (2) the uncertain outcome , where you introduce a phenomenon where the consequences have been unclear and then you reveal those consequences with your research; and (3) the evocative example , where you start with some interesting example from your research (a quote from the interview transcripts, for example) or the real world and then explain how that example illustrates the larger patterns you found in your research. Notice that each of these is a framing story. Framing stories are essential regardless of format!

A Word on Universal Design

Please consider accessibility issues during your presentation, and incorporate elements of universal design into your slideshow. The basic idea behind universal design in presentations is that to the greatest extent possible, all people should be able to view, hear, or otherwise take in your presentation without needing special individual adaptations. If you can make your presentation accessible to people with visual impairment or hearing loss, why not do so? For example, one in twelve men is color-blind, unable to differentiate between certain colors, red/green being the most common problem. So if you design a graphic that relies on red and green bars, some of your audience members may not be able to properly identify which bar means what. Simple contrasts of black and white are much more likely to be visible to all members of your audience. There are many other elements of good universal design, but the basic foundation of all of them is that you consider how to make your presentation as accessible as possible at the outset. For example, include captions whenever possible, both as descriptions on slides and as images on slides and for any audio or video clips you are including; keep font sizes large enough to read from the back of the room; and face the audience when you are.

Poster Design

Undergraduate students who present at conferences are often encouraged to present at “poster sessions.” This usually means setting up a poster version of your research in a large hall or convention space at a set period of time—ninety minutes is common. Your poster will be one of dozens, and conference-goers will wander through the space, stopping intermittently at posters that attract them. Those who stop by might ask you questions about your research, and you are expected to be able to talk intelligently for two or three minutes. It’s a fairly easy way to practice presenting at conferences, which is why so many organizations hold these special poster sessions.

A good poster design will be immediately attractive to passersby and clearly and succinctly describe your research methods, findings, and conclusions. Some students have simply shrunk down their research papers to manageable sizes and then pasted them on a poster, all twelve to fifteen pages of them. Don’t do that! Here are some better suggestions: State the main conclusion of your research in large bold print at the top of your poster, on brightly colored (contrasting) paper, and paste in a QR code that links to your full paper online ( Calarco 2020:280 ). Use the rest of the poster board to provide a couple of highlights and details of the study. For an interview-based study, for example, you will want to put in some details about your sample (including number of interviews) and setting and then perhaps one or two key quotes, also distinguished by contrasting color background.

Incorporating Visual Design in Your Presentations

In addition to ensuring that your presentation is accessible to as large an audience as possible, you also want to think about how to display your data in general, particularly how to use charts and graphs and figures. [6] The first piece of advice is, use them! As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. If you can cut to the chase with a visually stunning display, do so. But there are visual displays that are stunning, and then there are the tired, hard-to-see visual displays that predominate at conferences. You can do better than most presenters by simply paying attention here and committing yourself to a good design. As with model section passages, keep a file of visual displays that work as models for your own presentations. Find a good guidebook to presenting data effectively (Evergreen 2018 , 2019 ; Schwabisch 2021) , and refer to it often.

Let me make a few suggestions here to get you started. First, test every visual display on a friend or colleague to find out how quickly they can understand the point you are trying to convey. As with reading passages aloud to ensure that your writing works, showing someone your display is the quickest way to find out if it works. Second, put the point in the title of the display! When writing for an academic journal, there will be specific conventions of what to include in the title (full description including methods of analysis, sample, dates), but in a public presentation, there are no limiting rules. So you are free to write as your title “Working-Class College Students Are Three Times as Likely as Their Peers to Drop Out of College,” if that is the point of the graphic display. It certainly helps the communicative aspect. Third, use the themes available to you in Excel for creating graphic displays, but alter them to better fit your needs . Consider adding dark borders to bars and columns, for example, so that they appear crisper for your audience. Include data callouts and labels, and enlarge them so they are clearly visible. When duplicative or otherwise unnecessary, drop distracting gridlines and labels on the y-axis (the vertical one). Don’t go crazy adding different fonts, however—keep things simple and clear. Sans serif fonts (those without the little hooks on the ends of letters) read better from a distance. Try to use the same color scheme throughout, even if this means manually changing the colors of bars and columns. For example, when reporting on working-class college students, I use blue bars, while I reserve green bars for wealthy students and yellow bars for students in the middle. I repeat these colors throughout my presentations and incorporate different colors when talking about other items or factors. You can also try using simple grayscale throughout, with pops of color to indicate a bar or column or line that is of the most interest. These are just some suggestions. The point is to take presentation seriously and to pay attention to visual displays you are using to ensure they effectively communicate what you want them to communicate. I’ve included a data visualization checklist from Evergreen ( 2018 ) here.

Ethics of Presentation and Reliability

Until now, all the data you have collected have been yours alone. Once you present the data, however, you are sharing sometimes very intimate information about people with a broader public. You will find yourself balancing between protecting the privacy of those you’ve interviewed and observed and needing to demonstrate the reliability of the study. The more information you provide to your audience, the more they can understand and appreciate what you have found, but this also may pose risks to your participants. There is no one correct way to go about finding the right balance. As always, you have a duty to consider what you are doing and must make some hard decisions.

The most obvious place we see this paradox emerge is when you mask your data to protect the privacy of your participants. It is standard practice to provide pseudonyms, for example. It is such standard practice that you should always assume you are being given a pseudonym when reading a book or article based on qualitative research. When I was a graduate student, I tried to find information on how best to construct pseudonyms but found little guidance. There are some ethical issues here, I think. [7] Do you create a name that has the same kind of resonance as the original name? If the person goes by a nickname, should you use a nickname as a pseudonym? What about names that are ethnically marked (as in, almost all of them)? Is there something unethical about reracializing a person? (Yes!) In her study of adolescent subcultures, Wilkins ( 2008 ) noted, “Because many of the goths used creative, alternative names rather than their given names, I did my best to reproduce the spirit of their chosen names” ( 24 ).

Your reader or audience will want to know all the details about your participants so that they can gauge both your credibility and the reliability of your findings. But how many details are too many? What if you change the name but otherwise retain all the personal pieces of information about where they grew up, and how old they were when they got married, and how many children they have, and whether they made a splash in the news cycle that time they were stalked by their ex-boyfriend? At some point, those details are going to tip over into the zone of potential unmasking. When you are doing research at one particular field site that may be easily ascertained (as when you interview college students, probably at the institution at which you are a student yourself), it is even more important to be wary of providing too many details. You also need to think that your participants might read what you have written, know things about the site or the population from which you drew your interviews, and figure out whom you are talking about. This can all get very messy if you don’t do more than simply pseudonymize the people you interviewed or observed.

There are some ways to do this. One, you can design a study with all of these risks in mind. That might mean choosing to conduct interviews or observations at multiple sites so that no one person can be easily identified. Another is to alter some basic details about your participants to protect their identity or to refuse to provide all the information when selecting quotes . Let’s say you have an interviewee named “Anna” (a pseudonym), and she is a twenty-four-year-old Latina studying to be an engineer. You want to use a quote from Anna about racial discrimination in her graduate program. Instead of attributing the quote to Anna (whom your reader knows, because you’ve already told them, is a twenty-four-year-old Latina studying engineering), you might simply attribute the quote to “Latina student in STEM.” Taking this a step further, you might leave the quote unattributed, providing a list of quotes about racial discrimination by “various students.”

The problem with masking all the identifiers, of course, is that you lose some of the analytical heft of those attributes. If it mattered that Anna was twenty-four (not thirty-four) and that she was a Latina and that she was studying engineering, taking out any of those aspects of her identity might weaken your analysis. This is one of those “hard choices” you will be called on to make! A rather radical and controversial solution to this dilemma is to create composite characters , characters based on the reality of the interviews but fully masked because they are not identifiable with any one person. My students are often very queasy about this when I explain it to them. The more positivistic your approach and the more you see individuals rather than social relationships/structure as the “object” of your study, the more employing composites will seem like a really bad idea. But composites “allow researchers to present complex, situated accounts from individuals” without disclosing personal identities ( Willis 2019 ), and they can be effective ways of presenting theory narratively ( Hurst 2019 ). Ironically, composites permit you more latitude when including “dirty laundry” or stories that could harm individuals if their identities became known. Rather than squeezing out details that could identify a participant, the identities are permanently removed from the details. Great difficulty remains, however, in clearly explaining the theoretical use of composites to your audience and providing sufficient information on the reliability of the underlying data.

There are a host of other ethical issues that emerge as you write and present your data. This is where being reflective throughout the process will help. How and what you share of what you have learned will depend on the social relationships you have built, the audiences you are writing or speaking to, and the underlying animating goals of your study. Be conscious about all of your decisions, and then be able to explain them fully, both to yourself and to those who ask.

Our research is often close to us. As a Black woman who is a first-generation college student and a professional with a poverty/working-class origin, each of these pieces of my identity creates nuances in how I engage in my research, including how I share it out. Because of this, it’s important for us to have people in our lives who we trust who can help us, particularly, when we are trying to share our findings. As researchers, we have been steeped in our work, so we know all the details and nuances. Sometimes we take this for granted, and we might not have shared those nuances in conversation or writing or taken some of this information for granted. As I share my research with trusted friends and colleagues, I pay attention to the questions they ask me or the feedback they give when we talk or when they read drafts.

—Kim McAloney, PhD, College Student Services Administration Ecampus coordinator and instructor

Final Comments: Preparing for Being Challenged

Once you put your work out there, you must be ready to be challenged. Science is a collective enterprise and depends on a healthy give and take among researchers. This can be both novel and difficult as you get started, but the more you understand the importance of these challenges, the easier it will be to develop the kind of thick skin necessary for success in academia. Scientists’ authority rests on both the inherent strength of their findings and their ability to convince other scientists of the reliability and validity and value of those findings. So be prepared to be challenged, and recognize this as simply another important aspect of conducting research!

Considering what challenges might be made as you design and conduct your study will help you when you get to the writing and presentation stage. Address probable challenges in your final article, and have a planned response to probable questions in a conference presentation or job talk. The following is a list of common challenges of qualitative research and how you might best address them:

• Questions about generalizability . Although qualitative research is not statistically generalizable (and be prepared to explain why), qualitative research is theoretically generalizable. Discuss why your findings here might tell us something about related phenomena or contexts.
• Questions about reliability . You probably took steps to ensure the reliability of your findings. Discuss them! This includes explaining the use and value of multiple data sources and defending your sampling and case selections. It also means being transparent about your own position as researcher and explaining steps you took to ensure that what you were seeing was really there.
• Questions about replicability. Although qualitative research cannot strictly be replicated because the circumstances and contexts will necessarily be different (if only because the point in time is different), you should be able to provide as much detail as possible about how the study was conducted so that another researcher could attempt to confirm or disconfirm your findings. Also, be very clear about the limitations of your study, as this allows other researchers insight into what future research might be warranted.

None of this is easy, of course. Writing beautifully and presenting clearly and cogently require skill and practice. If you take anything from this chapter, it is to remember that presentation is an important and essential part of the research process and to allocate time for this as you plan your research.

Data Visualization Checklist for Slideshow (PPT) Presentations

Adapted from Evergreen ( 2018 )

Text checklist

• Short catchy, descriptive titles (e.g., “Working-class students are three times as likely to drop out of college”) summarize the point of the visual display
• Subtitled and annotations provide additional information (e.g., “note: male students also more likely to drop out”)
• Text size is hierarchical and readable (titles are largest; axes labels smallest, which should be at least 20points)
• Text is horizontal. Audience members cannot read vertical text!
• All data labeled directly and clearly: get rid of those “legends” and embed the data in your graphic display
• Labels are used sparingly; avoid redundancy (e.g., do not include both a number axis and a number label)

Arrangement checklist

• Proportions are accurate; bar charts should always start at zero; don’t mislead the audience!
• Data are intentionally ordered (e.g., by frequency counts). Do not leave ragged alphabetized bar graphs!
• Axis intervals are equidistant: spaces between axis intervals should be the same unit
• Graph is two-dimensional. Three-dimensional and “bevelled” displays are confusing
• There is no unwanted decoration (especially the kind that comes automatically through the PPT “theme”). This wastes your space and confuses.

Color checklist

• There is an intentional color scheme (do not use default theme)
• Color is used to identify key patterns (e.g., highlight one bar in red against six others in greyscale if this is the bar you want the audience to notice)
• Color is still legible when printed in black and white
• Color is legible for people with color blindness (do not use red/green or yellow/blue combinations)
• There is sufficient contrast between text and background (black text on white background works best; be careful of white on dark!)

Lines checklist

• Be wary of using gridlines; if you do, mute them (grey, not black)
• Allow graph to bleed into surroundings (don’t use border lines)
• Remove axis lines unless absolutely necessary (better to label directly)

Overall design checklist

• The display highlights a significant finding or conclusion that your audience can ‘”see” relatively quickly
• The type of graph (e.g., bar chart, pie chart, line graph) is appropriate for the data. Avoid pie charts with more than three slices!
• Graph has appropriate level of precision; if you don’t need decimal places
• All the chart elements work together to reinforce the main message

Universal Design Checklist for Slideshow (PPT) Presentations

• Include both verbal and written descriptions (e.g., captions on slides); consider providing a hand-out to accompany the presentation
• Microphone available (ask audience in back if they can clearly hear)
• Face audience; allow people to read your lips
• Turn on captions when presenting audio or video clips
• Adjust light settings for visibility
• Speak slowly and clearly; practice articulation; don’t mutter or speak under your breath (even if you have something humorous to say – say it loud!)
• Use Black/White contrasts for easy visibility; or use color contrasts that are real contrasts (do not rely on people being able to differentiate red from green, for example)
• Use easy to read font styles and avoid too small font sizes: think about what an audience member in the back row will be able to see and read.
• Keep your slides simple: do not overclutter them; if you are including quotes from your interviews, take short evocative snippets only, and bold key words and passages. You should also read aloud each passage, preferably with feeling!

Supplement: Models of Written Sections for Future Reference

Data collection section example.

Interviews were semi structured, lasted between one and three hours, and took place at a location chosen by the interviewee. Discussions centered on four general topics: (1) knowledge of their parent’s immigration experiences; (2) relationship with their parents; (3) understanding of family labor, including language-brokering experiences; and (4) experiences with school and peers, including any future life plans. While conducting interviews, I paid close attention to respondents’ nonverbal cues, as well as their use of metaphors and jokes. I conducted interviews until I reached a point of saturation, as indicated by encountering repeated themes in new interviews (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed with each interviewee’s permission, and conducted in accordance with IRB protocols. Minors received permission from their parents before participation in the interview. ( Kwon 2022:1832 )

Justification of Case Selection / Sample Description Section Example

Looking at one profession within one organization and in one geographic area does impose limitations on the generalizability of our findings. However, it also has advantages. We eliminate the problem of interorganizational heterogeneity. If multiple organizations are studied simultaneously, it can make it difficult to discern the mechanisms that contribute to racial inequalities. Even with a single occupation there is considerable heterogeneity, which may make understanding how organizational structure impacts worker outcomes difficult. By using the case of one group of professionals in one religious denomination in one geographic region of the United States, we clarify how individuals’ perceptions and experiences of occupational inequality unfold in relation to a variety of observed and unobserved occupational and contextual factors that might be obscured in a larger-scale study. Focusing on a specific group of professionals allows us to explore and identify ways that formal organizational rules combine with informal processes to contribute to the persistence of racial inequality. ( Eagle and Mueller 2022:1510–1511 )

Ethics Section Example

I asked everyone who was willing to sit for a formal interview to speak only for themselves and offered each of them a prepaid Visa Card worth $25–40. I also offered everyone the opportunity to keep the card and erase the tape completely at any time they were dissatisfied with the interview in any way. No one asked for the tape to be erased; rather, people remarked on the interview being a really good experience because they felt heard. Each interview was professionally transcribed and for the most part the excerpts are literal transcriptions. In a few places, the excerpts have been edited to reduce colloquial features of speech (e.g., you know, like, um) and some recursive elements common to spoken language. A few excerpts were placed into standard English for clarity. I made this choice for the benefit of readers who might otherwise find the insights and ideas harder to parse in the original. However, I have to acknowledge this as an act of class-based violence. I tried to keep the original phrasing whenever possible. ( Pascale 2021:235 )

Further Readings

Calarco, Jessica McCrory. 2020. A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Don’t let the unassuming title mislead you—there is a wealth of helpful information on writing and presenting data included here in a highly accessible manner. Every graduate student should have a copy of this book.

Edwards, Mark. 2012. Writing in Sociology . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. An excellent guide to writing and presenting sociological research by an Oregon State University professor. Geared toward undergraduates and useful for writing about either quantitative or qualitative research or both.

Evergreen, Stephanie D. H. 2018. Presenting Data Effectively: Communicating Your Findings for Maximum Impact . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. This is one of my very favorite books, and I recommend it highly for everyone who wants their presentations and publications to communicate more effectively than the boring black-and-white, ragged-edge tables and figures academics are used to seeing.

Evergreen, Stephanie D. H. 2019. Effective Data Visualization 2 . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. This is an advanced primer for presenting clean and clear data using graphs, tables, color, font, and so on. Start with Evergreen (2018), and if you graduate from that text, move on to this one.

Schwabisch, Jonathan. 2021. Better Data Visualizations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks . New York: Columbia University Press. Where Evergreen’s (2018, 2019) focus is on how to make the best visual displays possible for effective communication, this book is specifically geared toward visual displays of academic data, both quantitative and qualitative. If you want to know when it is appropriate to use a pie chart instead of a stacked bar chart, this is the reference to use.

• Some examples: Qualitative Inquiry , Qualitative Research , American Journal of Qualitative Research , Ethnography , Journal of Ethnographic and Qualitative Research , Qualitative Report , Qualitative Sociology , and Qualitative Studies . ↵
• This is something I do with every article I write: using Excel, I write each element of the expected article in a separate row, with one column for “expected word count” and another column for “actual word count.” I fill in the actual word count as I write. I add a third column for “comments to myself”—how things are progressing, what I still need to do, and so on. I then use the “sum” function below each of the first two columns to keep a running count of my progress relative to the final word count. ↵
• And this is true, I would argue, even when your primary goal is to leave space for the voices of those who don’t usually get a chance to be part of the conversation. You will still want to put those voices in some kind of choir, with a clear direction (song) to be sung. The worst thing you can do is overwhelm your audience with random quotes or long passages with no key to understanding them. Yes, a lot of metaphors—qualitative researchers love metaphors! ↵
• To take Calarco’s recipe analogy further, do not write like those food bloggers who spend more time discussing the color of their kitchen or the experiences they had at the market than they do the actual cooking; similarly, do not write recipes that omit crucial details like the amount of flour or the size of the baking pan used or the temperature of the oven. ↵
• The exception is the “compare and contrast” of two or more quotes, but use caution here. None of the quotes should be very long at all (a sentence or two each). ↵
• Although this section is geared toward presentations, many of the suggestions could also be useful when writing about your data. Don’t be afraid to use charts and graphs and figures when writing your proposal, article, thesis, or dissertation. At the very least, you should incorporate a tabular display of the participants, sites, or documents used. ↵
• I was so puzzled by these kinds of questions that I wrote one of my very first articles on it ( Hurst 2008 ). ↵

The visual presentation of data or information through graphics such as charts, graphs, plots, infographics, maps, and animation.  Recall the best documentary you ever viewed, and there were probably excellent examples of good data visualization there (for me, this was An Inconvenient Truth , Al Gore’s film about climate change).  Good data visualization allows more effective communication of findings of research, particularly in public presentations (e.g., slideshows).

Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods Copyright © 2023 by Allison Hurst is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Qualitative Data Analysis: Step-by-Step Guide (Manual vs. Automatic)

When we conduct qualitative methods of research, need to explain changes in metrics or understand people's opinions, we always turn to qualitative data. Qualitative data is typically generated through:

• Interview transcripts
• Surveys with open-ended questions
• Contact center transcripts
• Texts and documents
• Audio and video recordings
• Observational notes

Compared to quantitative data, which captures structured information, qualitative data is unstructured and has more depth. It can answer our questions, can help formulate hypotheses and build understanding.

It's important to understand the differences between quantitative data & qualitative data . But unfortunately, analyzing qualitative data is difficult. While tools like Excel, Tableau and PowerBI crunch and visualize quantitative data with ease, there are a limited number of mainstream tools for analyzing qualitative data . The majority of qualitative data analysis still happens manually.

That said, there are two new trends that are changing this. First, there are advances in natural language processing (NLP) which is focused on understanding human language. Second, there is an explosion of user-friendly software designed for both researchers and businesses. Both help automate the qualitative data analysis process.

In this post we want to teach you how to conduct a successful qualitative data analysis. There are two primary qualitative data analysis methods; manual & automatic. We will teach you how to conduct the analysis manually, and also, automatically using software solutions powered by NLP. We’ll guide you through the steps to conduct a manual analysis, and look at what is involved and the role technology can play in automating this process.

More businesses are switching to fully-automated analysis of qualitative customer data because it is cheaper, faster, and just as accurate. Primarily, businesses purchase subscriptions to feedback analytics platforms so that they can understand customer pain points and sentiment.

We’ll take you through 5 steps to conduct a successful qualitative data analysis. Within each step we will highlight the key difference between the manual, and automated approach of qualitative researchers. Here's an overview of the steps:

The 5 steps to doing qualitative data analysis

• Gathering and collecting your qualitative data
• Organizing and connecting into your qualitative data
• Coding your qualitative data
• Analyzing the qualitative data for insights
• Reporting on the insights derived from your analysis

What is Qualitative Data Analysis?

Qualitative data analysis is a process of gathering, structuring and interpreting qualitative data to understand what it represents.

Qualitative data is non-numerical and unstructured. Qualitative data generally refers to text, such as open-ended responses to survey questions or user interviews, but also includes audio, photos and video.

Businesses often perform qualitative data analysis on customer feedback. And within this context, qualitative data generally refers to verbatim text data collected from sources such as reviews, complaints, chat messages, support centre interactions, customer interviews, case notes or social media comments.

How is qualitative data analysis different from quantitative data analysis?

Understanding the differences between quantitative & qualitative data is important. When it comes to analyzing data, Qualitative Data Analysis serves a very different role to Quantitative Data Analysis. But what sets them apart?

Qualitative Data Analysis dives into the stories hidden in non-numerical data such as interviews, open-ended survey answers, or notes from observations. It uncovers the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ giving a deep understanding of people’s experiences and emotions.

Quantitative Data Analysis on the other hand deals with numerical data, using statistics to measure differences, identify preferred options, and pinpoint root causes of issues.  It steps back to address questions like "how many" or "what percentage" to offer broad insights we can apply to larger groups.

In short, Qualitative Data Analysis is like a microscope,  helping us understand specific detail. Quantitative Data Analysis is like the telescope, giving us a broader perspective. Both are important, working together to decode data for different objectives.

Qualitative Data Analysis methods

Once all the data has been captured, there are a variety of analysis techniques available and the choice is determined by your specific research objectives and the kind of data you’ve gathered.  Common qualitative data analysis methods include:

Content Analysis

This is a popular approach to qualitative data analysis. Other qualitative analysis techniques may fit within the broad scope of content analysis. Thematic analysis is a part of the content analysis.  Content analysis is used to identify the patterns that emerge from text, by grouping content into words, concepts, and themes. Content analysis is useful to quantify the relationship between all of the grouped content. The Columbia School of Public Health has a detailed breakdown of content analysis .

Narrative Analysis

Narrative analysis focuses on the stories people tell and the language they use to make sense of them.  It is particularly useful in qualitative research methods where customer stories are used to get a deep understanding of customers’ perspectives on a specific issue. A narrative analysis might enable us to summarize the outcomes of a focused case study.

Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is used to get a thorough understanding of the political, cultural and power dynamics that exist in specific situations.  The focus of discourse analysis here is on the way people express themselves in different social contexts. Discourse analysis is commonly used by brand strategists who hope to understand why a group of people feel the way they do about a brand or product.

Thematic Analysis

Thematic analysis is used to deduce the meaning behind the words people use. This is accomplished by discovering repeating themes in text. These meaningful themes reveal key insights into data and can be quantified, particularly when paired with sentiment analysis . Often, the outcome of thematic analysis is a code frame that captures themes in terms of codes, also called categories. So the process of thematic analysis is also referred to as “coding”. A common use-case for thematic analysis in companies is analysis of customer feedback.

Grounded Theory

Grounded theory is a useful approach when little is known about a subject. Grounded theory starts by formulating a theory around a single data case. This means that the theory is “grounded”. Grounded theory analysis is based on actual data, and not entirely speculative. Then additional cases can be examined to see if they are relevant and can add to the original grounded theory.

Challenges of Qualitative Data Analysis

While Qualitative Data Analysis offers rich insights, it comes with its challenges. Each unique QDA method has its unique hurdles. Let’s take a look at the challenges researchers and analysts might face, depending on the chosen method.

• Time and Effort (Narrative Analysis): Narrative analysis, which focuses on personal stories, demands patience. Sifting through lengthy narratives to find meaningful insights can be time-consuming, requires dedicated effort.
• Being Objective (Grounded Theory): Grounded theory, building theories from data, faces the challenges of personal biases. Staying objective while interpreting data is crucial, ensuring conclusions are rooted in the data itself.
• Complexity (Thematic Analysis): Thematic analysis involves identifying themes within data, a process that can be intricate. Categorizing and understanding themes can be complex, especially when each piece of data varies in context and structure. Thematic Analysis software can simplify this process.
• Generalizing Findings (Narrative Analysis): Narrative analysis, dealing with individual stories, makes drawing broad challenging. Extending findings from a single narrative to a broader context requires careful consideration.
• Managing Data (Thematic Analysis): Thematic analysis involves organizing and managing vast amounts of unstructured data, like interview transcripts. Managing this can be a hefty task, requiring effective data management strategies.
• Skill Level (Grounded Theory): Grounded theory demands specific skills to build theories from the ground up. Finding or training analysts with these skills poses a challenge, requiring investment in building expertise.

Benefits of qualitative data analysis

Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) is like a versatile toolkit, offering a tailored approach to understanding your data. The benefits it offers are as diverse as the methods. Let’s explore why choosing the right method matters.

• Tailored Methods for Specific Needs: QDA isn't one-size-fits-all. Depending on your research objectives and the type of data at hand, different methods offer unique benefits. If you want emotive customer stories, narrative analysis paints a strong picture. When you want to explain a score, thematic analysis reveals insightful patterns
• Flexibility with Thematic Analysis: thematic analysis is like a chameleon in the toolkit of QDA. It adapts well to different types of data and research objectives, making it a top choice for any qualitative analysis.
• Deeper Understanding, Better Products: QDA helps you dive into people's thoughts and feelings. This deep understanding helps you build products and services that truly matches what people want, ensuring satisfied customers
• Finding the Unexpected: Qualitative data often reveals surprises that we miss in quantitative data. QDA offers us new ideas and perspectives, for insights we might otherwise miss.
• Building Effective Strategies: Insights from QDA are like strategic guides. They help businesses in crafting plans that match people’s desires.
• Creating Genuine Connections: Understanding people’s experiences lets businesses connect on a real level. This genuine connection helps build trust and loyalty, priceless for any business.

How to do Qualitative Data Analysis: 5 steps

Now we are going to show how you can do your own qualitative data analysis. We will guide you through this process step by step. As mentioned earlier, you will learn how to do qualitative data analysis manually , and also automatically using modern qualitative data and thematic analysis software.

To get best value from the analysis process and research process, it’s important to be super clear about the nature and scope of the question that’s being researched. This will help you select the research collection channels that are most likely to help you answer your question.

Depending on if you are a business looking to understand customer sentiment, or an academic surveying a school, your approach to qualitative data analysis will be unique.

Once you’re clear, there’s a sequence to follow. And, though there are differences in the manual and automatic approaches, the process steps are mostly the same.

The use case for our step-by-step guide is a company looking to collect data (customer feedback data), and analyze the customer feedback - in order to improve customer experience. By analyzing the customer feedback the company derives insights about their business and their customers. You can follow these same steps regardless of the nature of your research. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Gather your qualitative data and conduct research (Conduct qualitative research)

The first step of qualitative research is to do data collection. Put simply, data collection is gathering all of your data for analysis. A common situation is when qualitative data is spread across various sources.

Classic methods of gathering qualitative data

Most companies use traditional methods for gathering qualitative data: conducting interviews with research participants, running surveys, and running focus groups. This data is typically stored in documents, CRMs, databases and knowledge bases. It’s important to examine which data is available and needs to be included in your research project, based on its scope.

Using your existing qualitative feedback

As it becomes easier for customers to engage across a range of different channels, companies are gathering increasingly large amounts of both solicited and unsolicited qualitative feedback.

Most organizations have now invested in Voice of Customer programs , support ticketing systems, chatbot and support conversations, emails and even customer Slack chats.

These new channels provide companies with new ways of getting feedback, and also allow the collection of unstructured feedback data at scale.

The great thing about this data is that it contains a wealth of valubale insights and that it’s already there! When you have a new question about user behavior or your customers, you don’t need to create a new research study or set up a focus group. You can find most answers in the data you already have.

Typically, this data is stored in third-party solutions or a central database, but there are ways to export it or connect to a feedback analysis solution through integrations or an API.

Utilize untapped qualitative data channels

There are many online qualitative data sources you may not have considered. For example, you can find useful qualitative data in social media channels like Twitter or Facebook. Online forums, review sites, and online communities such as Discourse or Reddit also contain valuable data about your customers, or research questions.

If you are considering performing a qualitative benchmark analysis against competitors - the internet is your best friend, and review analysis is a great place to start. Gathering feedback in competitor reviews on sites like Trustpilot, G2, Capterra, Better Business Bureau or on app stores is a great way to perform a competitor benchmark analysis.

Customer feedback analysis software often has integrations into social media and review sites, or you could use a solution like DataMiner to scrape the reviews.

Step 2: Connect & organize all your qualitative data

Now you all have this qualitative data but there’s a problem, the data is unstructured. Before feedback can be analyzed and assigned any value, it needs to be organized in a single place. Why is this important? Consistency!

If all data is easily accessible in one place and analyzed in a consistent manner, you will have an easier time summarizing and making decisions based on this data.

The manual approach to organizing your data

The classic method of structuring qualitative data is to plot all the raw data you’ve gathered into a spreadsheet.

Typically, research and support teams would share large Excel sheets and different business units would make sense of the qualitative feedback data on their own. Each team collects and organizes the data in a way that best suits them, which means the feedback tends to be kept in separate silos.

An alternative and a more robust solution is to store feedback in a central database, like Snowflake or Amazon Redshift .

Keep in mind that when you organize your data in this way, you are often preparing it to be imported into another software. If you go the route of a database, you would need to use an API to push the feedback into a third-party software.

Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS)

Traditionally within the manual analysis approach (but not always), qualitative data is imported into CAQDAS software for coding.

In the early 2000s, CAQDAS software was popularised by developers such as ATLAS.ti, NVivo and MAXQDA and eagerly adopted by researchers to assist with the organizing and coding of data.  

The benefits of using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software:

• Assists in the organizing of your data
• Opens you up to exploring different interpretations of your data analysis
• Allows you to share your dataset easier and allows group collaboration (allows for secondary analysis)

However you still need to code the data, uncover the themes and do the analysis yourself. Therefore it is still a manual approach.

Organizing your qualitative data in a feedback repository

Another solution to organizing your qualitative data is to upload it into a feedback repository where it can be unified with your other data , and easily searchable and taggable. There are a number of software solutions that act as a central repository for your qualitative research data. Here are a couple solutions that you could investigate:  

• Dovetail: Dovetail is a research repository with a focus on video and audio transcriptions. You can tag your transcriptions within the platform for theme analysis. You can also upload your other qualitative data such as research reports, survey responses, support conversations ( conversational analytics ), and customer interviews. Dovetail acts as a single, searchable repository. And makes it easier to collaborate with other people around your qualitative research.
• EnjoyHQ: EnjoyHQ is another research repository with similar functionality to Dovetail. It boasts a more sophisticated search engine, but it has a higher starting subscription cost.

Organizing your qualitative data in a feedback analytics platform

If you have a lot of qualitative customer or employee feedback, from the likes of customer surveys or employee surveys, you will benefit from a feedback analytics platform. A feedback analytics platform is a software that automates the process of both sentiment analysis and thematic analysis . Companies use the integrations offered by these platforms to directly tap into their qualitative data sources (review sites, social media, survey responses, etc.). The data collected is then organized and analyzed consistently within the platform.

If you have data prepared in a spreadsheet, it can also be imported into feedback analytics platforms.

Once all this rich data has been organized within the feedback analytics platform, it is ready to be coded and themed, within the same platform. Thematic is a feedback analytics platform that offers one of the largest libraries of integrations with qualitative data sources.

Step 3: Coding your qualitative data

Your feedback data is now organized in one place. Either within your spreadsheet, CAQDAS, feedback repository or within your feedback analytics platform. The next step is to code your feedback data so we can extract meaningful insights in the next step.

Coding is the process of labelling and organizing your data in such a way that you can then identify themes in the data, and the relationships between these themes.

To simplify the coding process, you will take small samples of your customer feedback data, come up with a set of codes, or categories capturing themes, and label each piece of feedback, systematically, for patterns and meaning. Then you will take a larger sample of data, revising and refining the codes for greater accuracy and consistency as you go.

If you choose to use a feedback analytics platform, much of this process will be automated and accomplished for you.

The terms to describe different categories of meaning (‘theme’, ‘code’, ‘tag’, ‘category’ etc) can be confusing as they are often used interchangeably.  For clarity, this article will use the term ‘code’.

To code means to identify key words or phrases and assign them to a category of meaning. “I really hate the customer service of this computer software company” would be coded as “poor customer service”.

How to manually code your qualitative data

• Decide whether you will use deductive or inductive coding. Deductive coding is when you create a list of predefined codes, and then assign them to the qualitative data. Inductive coding is the opposite of this, you create codes based on the data itself. Codes arise directly from the data and you label them as you go. You need to weigh up the pros and cons of each coding method and select the most appropriate.
• Read through the feedback data to get a broad sense of what it reveals. Now it’s time to start assigning your first set of codes to statements and sections of text.
• Keep repeating step 2, adding new codes and revising the code description as often as necessary.  Once it has all been coded, go through everything again, to be sure there are no inconsistencies and that nothing has been overlooked.
• Create a code frame to group your codes. The coding frame is the organizational structure of all your codes. And there are two commonly used types of coding frames, flat, or hierarchical. A hierarchical code frame will make it easier for you to derive insights from your analysis.
• Based on the number of times a particular code occurs, you can now see the common themes in your feedback data. This is insightful! If ‘bad customer service’ is a common code, it’s time to take action.

We have a detailed guide dedicated to manually coding your qualitative data .

Using software to speed up manual coding of qualitative data

An Excel spreadsheet is still a popular method for coding. But various software solutions can help speed up this process. Here are some examples.

• CAQDAS / NVivo - CAQDAS software has built-in functionality that allows you to code text within their software. You may find the interface the software offers easier for managing codes than a spreadsheet.
• Dovetail/EnjoyHQ - You can tag transcripts and other textual data within these solutions. As they are also repositories you may find it simpler to keep the coding in one platform.
• IBM SPSS - SPSS is a statistical analysis software that may make coding easier than in a spreadsheet.
• Ascribe - Ascribe’s ‘Coder’ is a coding management system. Its user interface will make it easier for you to manage your codes.

Automating the qualitative coding process using thematic analysis software

In solutions which speed up the manual coding process, you still have to come up with valid codes and often apply codes manually to pieces of feedback. But there are also solutions that automate both the discovery and the application of codes.

Advances in machine learning have now made it possible to read, code and structure qualitative data automatically. This type of automated coding is offered by thematic analysis software .

Automation makes it far simpler and faster to code the feedback and group it into themes. By incorporating natural language processing (NLP) into the software, the AI looks across sentences and phrases to identify common themes meaningful statements. Some automated solutions detect repeating patterns and assign codes to them, others make you train the AI by providing examples. You could say that the AI learns the meaning of the feedback on its own.

Thematic automates the coding of qualitative feedback regardless of source. There’s no need to set up themes or categories in advance. Simply upload your data and wait a few minutes. You can also manually edit the codes to further refine their accuracy.  Experiments conducted indicate that Thematic’s automated coding is just as accurate as manual coding .

Paired with sentiment analysis and advanced text analytics - these automated solutions become powerful for deriving quality business or research insights.

You could also build your own , if you have the resources!

The key benefits of using an automated coding solution

Automated analysis can often be set up fast and there’s the potential to uncover things that would never have been revealed if you had given the software a prescribed list of themes to look for.

Because the model applies a consistent rule to the data, it captures phrases or statements that a human eye might have missed.

Complete and consistent analysis of customer feedback enables more meaningful findings. Leading us into step 4.

Step 4: Analyze your data: Find meaningful insights

Now we are going to analyze our data to find insights. This is where we start to answer our research questions. Keep in mind that step 4 and step 5 (tell the story) have some overlap . This is because creating visualizations is both part of analysis process and reporting.

The task of uncovering insights is to scour through the codes that emerge from the data and draw meaningful correlations from them. It is also about making sure each insight is distinct and has enough data to support it.

Part of the analysis is to establish how much each code relates to different demographics and customer profiles, and identify whether there’s any relationship between these data points.

Manually create sub-codes to improve the quality of insights

If your code frame only has one level, you may find that your codes are too broad to be able to extract meaningful insights. This is where it is valuable to create sub-codes to your primary codes. This process is sometimes referred to as meta coding.

Note: If you take an inductive coding approach, you can create sub-codes as you are reading through your feedback data and coding it.

While time-consuming, this exercise will improve the quality of your analysis. Here is an example of what sub-codes could look like.

You need to carefully read your qualitative data to create quality sub-codes. But as you can see, the depth of analysis is greatly improved. By calculating the frequency of these sub-codes you can get insight into which  customer service problems you can immediately address.

Correlate the frequency of codes to customer segments

Many businesses use customer segmentation . And you may have your own respondent segments that you can apply to your qualitative analysis. Segmentation is the practise of dividing customers or research respondents into subgroups.

Segments can be based on:

• Demographic
• And any other data type that you care to segment by

It is particularly useful to see the occurrence of codes within your segments. If one of your customer segments is considered unimportant to your business, but they are the cause of nearly all customer service complaints, it may be in your best interest to focus attention elsewhere. This is a useful insight!

Manually visualizing coded qualitative data

There are formulas you can use to visualize key insights in your data. The formulas we will suggest are imperative if you are measuring a score alongside your feedback.

If you are collecting a metric alongside your qualitative data this is a key visualization. Impact answers the question: “What’s the impact of a code on my overall score?”. Using Net Promoter Score (NPS) as an example, first you need to:

• Calculate overall NPS
• Calculate NPS in the subset of responses that do not contain that theme
• Subtract B from A

Then you can use this simple formula to calculate code impact on NPS .

You can then visualize this data using a bar chart.

You can download our CX toolkit - it includes a template to recreate this.

Trends over time

This analysis can help you answer questions like: “Which codes are linked to decreases or increases in my score over time?”

We need to compare two sequences of numbers: NPS over time and code frequency over time . Using Excel, calculate the correlation between the two sequences, which can be either positive (the more codes the higher the NPS, see picture below), or negative (the more codes the lower the NPS).

Now you need to plot code frequency against the absolute value of code correlation with NPS. Here is the formula:

The visualization could look like this:

These are two examples, but there are more. For a third manual formula, and to learn why word clouds are not an insightful form of analysis, read our visualizations article .

Using a text analytics solution to automate analysis

Automated text analytics solutions enable codes and sub-codes to be pulled out of the data automatically. This makes it far faster and easier to identify what’s driving negative or positive results. And to pick up emerging trends and find all manner of rich insights in the data.

Another benefit of AI-driven text analytics software is its built-in capability for sentiment analysis, which provides the emotive context behind your feedback and other qualitative textual data therein.

Thematic provides text analytics that goes further by allowing users to apply their expertise on business context to edit or augment the AI-generated outputs.

Since the move away from manual research is generally about reducing the human element, adding human input to the technology might sound counter-intuitive. However, this is mostly to make sure important business nuances in the feedback aren’t missed during coding. The result is a higher accuracy of analysis. This is sometimes referred to as augmented intelligence .

Step 5: Report on your data: Tell the story

The last step of analyzing your qualitative data is to report on it, to tell the story. At this point, the codes are fully developed and the focus is on communicating the narrative to the audience.

A coherent outline of the qualitative research, the findings and the insights is vital for stakeholders to discuss and debate before they can devise a meaningful course of action.

Creating graphs and reporting in Powerpoint

Typically, qualitative researchers take the tried and tested approach of distilling their report into a series of charts, tables and other visuals which are woven into a narrative for presentation in Powerpoint.

Using visualization software for reporting

With data transformation and APIs, the analyzed data can be shared with data visualisation software, such as Power BI or Tableau , Google Studio or Looker. Power BI and Tableau are among the most preferred options.

Visualizing your insights inside a feedback analytics platform

Feedback analytics platforms, like Thematic, incorporate visualisation tools that intuitively turn key data and insights into graphs.  This removes the time consuming work of constructing charts to visually identify patterns and creates more time to focus on building a compelling narrative that highlights the insights, in bite-size chunks, for executive teams to review.

Using a feedback analytics platform with visualization tools means you don’t have to use a separate product for visualizations. You can export graphs into Powerpoints straight from the platforms.

Conclusion - Manual or Automated?

There are those who remain deeply invested in the manual approach - because it’s familiar, because they’re reluctant to spend money and time learning new software, or because they’ve been burned by the overpromises of AI.  

For projects that involve small datasets, manual analysis makes sense. For example, if the objective is simply to quantify a simple question like “Do customers prefer X concepts to Y?”. If the findings are being extracted from a small set of focus groups and interviews, sometimes it’s easier to just read them

However, as new generations come into the workplace, it’s technology-driven solutions that feel more comfortable and practical. And the merits are undeniable.  Especially if the objective is to go deeper and understand the ‘why’ behind customers’ preference for X or Y. And even more especially if time and money are considerations.

The ability to collect a free flow of qualitative feedback data at the same time as the metric means AI can cost-effectively scan, crunch, score and analyze a ton of feedback from one system in one go. And time-intensive processes like focus groups, or coding, that used to take weeks, can now be completed in a matter of hours or days.

But aside from the ever-present business case to speed things up and keep costs down, there are also powerful research imperatives for automated analysis of qualitative data: namely, accuracy and consistency.

Finding insights hidden in feedback requires consistency, especially in coding.  Not to mention catching all the ‘unknown unknowns’ that can skew research findings and steering clear of cognitive bias.

Some say without manual data analysis researchers won’t get an accurate “feel” for the insights. However, the larger data sets are, the harder it is to sort through the feedback and organize feedback that has been pulled from different places.  And, the more difficult it is to stay on course, the greater the risk of drawing incorrect, or incomplete, conclusions grows.

Though the process steps for qualitative data analysis have remained pretty much unchanged since psychologist Paul Felix Lazarsfeld paved the path a hundred years ago, the impact digital technology has had on types of qualitative feedback data and the approach to the analysis are profound.  

If you want to try an automated feedback analysis solution on your own qualitative data, you can get started with Thematic .

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The Ultimate Guide to Qualitative Research - Part 3: Presenting Qualitative Data

• Introduction

How do you present qualitative data?

Data visualization.

• Research paper writing
• Transparency and rigor in research
• How to publish a research paper

Table of contents

• Transparency and rigor

Navigate to other guide parts:

Part 1: The Basics or Part 2: Handling Qualitative Data

• Presenting qualitative data

In the end, presenting qualitative research findings is just as important a skill as mastery of qualitative research methods for the data collection and data analysis process . Simply uncovering insights is insufficient to the research process; presenting a qualitative analysis holds the challenge of persuading your audience of the value of your research. As a result, it's worth spending some time considering how best to report your research to facilitate its contribution to scientific knowledge.

When it comes to research, presenting data in a meaningful and accessible way is as important as gathering it. This is particularly true for qualitative research , where the richness and complexity of the data demand careful and thoughtful presentation. Poorly written research is taken less seriously and left undiscussed by the greater scholarly community; quality research reporting that persuades its audience stands a greater chance of being incorporated in discussions of scientific knowledge.

Qualitative data presentation differs fundamentally from that found in quantitative research. While quantitative data tend to be numerical and easily lend themselves to statistical analysis and graphical representation, qualitative data are often textual and unstructured, requiring an interpretive approach to bring out their inherent meanings. Regardless of the methodological approach , the ultimate goal of data presentation is to communicate research findings effectively to an audience so they can incorporate the generated knowledge into their research inquiry.

As the section on research rigor will suggest, an effective presentation of your research depends on a thorough scientific process that organizes raw data into a structure that allows for a thorough analysis for scientific understanding.

Preparing the data

The first step in presenting qualitative data is preparing the data. This preparation process often begins with cleaning and organizing the data. Cleaning involves checking the data for accuracy and completeness, removing any irrelevant information, and making corrections as needed. Organizing the data often entails arranging the data into categories or groups that make sense for your research framework.

Coding the data

Once the data are cleaned and organized, the next step is coding , a crucial part of qualitative data analysis. Coding involves assigning labels to segments of the data to summarize or categorize them. This process helps to identify patterns and themes in the data, laying the groundwork for subsequent data interpretation and presentation. Qualitative research often involves multiple iterations of coding, creating new and meaningful codes while discarding unnecessary ones , to generate a rich structure through which data analysis can occur.

Uncovering insights

As you navigate through these initial steps, keep in mind the broader aim of qualitative research, which is to provide rich, detailed, and nuanced understandings of people's experiences, behaviors, and social realities. These guiding principles will help to ensure that your data presentation is not only accurate and comprehensive but also meaningful and impactful.

While this process might seem intimidating at first, it's an essential part of any qualitative research project. It's also a skill that can be learned and refined over time, so don't be discouraged if you find it challenging at first. Remember, the goal of presenting qualitative data is to make your research findings accessible and understandable to others. This requires careful preparation, a clear understanding of your data, and a commitment to presenting your findings in a way that respects and honors the complexity of the phenomena you're studying.

In the following sections, we'll delve deeper into how to create a comprehensive narrative from your data, the visualization of qualitative data , and the writing and publication processes . Let's briefly excerpt some of the content in the articles in this part of the guide.

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How often do you read a research article and skip straight to the tables and figures? That's because data visualizations representing qualitative and quantitative data have the power to make large and complex research projects with thousands of data points comprehensible when authors present data to research audiences. Researchers create visual representations to help summarize the data generated from their study and make clear the pathways for actionable insights.

In everyday situations, a picture is always worth a thousand words. Illustrations, figures, and charts convey messages that words alone cannot. In research, data visualization can help explain scientific knowledge, evidence for data insights, and key performance indicators in an orderly manner based on data that is otherwise unstructured.

For all of the various data formats available to researchers, a significant portion of qualitative and social science research is still text-based. Essays, reports, and research articles still rely on writing practices aimed at repackaging research in prose form. This can create the impression that simply writing more will persuade research audiences. Instead, framing research in terms that are easy for your target readers to understand makes it easier for your research to become published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals or find engagement at scholarly conferences. Even in market or professional settings, data visualization is an essential concept when you need to convince others about the insights of your research and the recommendations you make based on the data.

Importance of data visualization

Data visualization is important because it makes it easy for your research audience to understand your data sets and your findings. Also, data visualization helps you organize your data more efficiently. As the explanation of ATLAS.ti's tools will illustrate in this section, data visualization might point you to research inquiries that you might not even be aware of, helping you get the most out of your data. Strictly speaking, the primary role of data visualization is to make the analysis of your data , if not the data itself, clear. Especially in social science research, data visualization makes it easy to see how data scientists collect and analyze data.

Prerequisites for generating data visualizations

Data visualization is effective in explaining research to others only if the researcher or data scientist can make sense of the data in front of them. Traditional research with unstructured data usually calls for coding the data with short, descriptive codes that can be analyzed later, whether statistically or thematically. These codes form the basic data points of a meaningful qualitative analysis . They represent the structure of qualitative data sets, without which a scientific visualization with research rigor would be extremely difficult to achieve. In most respects, data visualization of a qualitative research project requires coding the entire data set so that the codes adequately represent the collected data.

A successfully crafted research study culminates in the writing of the research paper . While a pilot study or preliminary research might guide the research design , a full research study leads to discussion that highlights avenues for further research. As such, the importance of the research paper cannot be overestimated in the overall generation of scientific knowledge.

The physical and natural sciences tend to have a clinical structure for a research paper that mirrors the scientific method: outline the background research, explain the materials and methods of the study, outline the research findings generated from data analysis, and discuss the implications. Qualitative research tends to preserve much of this structure, but there are notable and numerous variations from a traditional research paper that it's worth emphasizing the flexibility in the social sciences with respect to the writing process.

Requirements for research writing

While there aren't any hard and fast rules regarding what belongs in a qualitative research paper , readers expect to find a number of pieces of relevant information in a rigorously-written report. The best way to know what belongs in a full research paper is to look at articles in your target journal or articles that share a particular topic similar to yours and examine how successfully published papers are written.

It's important to emphasize the more mundane but equally important concerns of proofreading and formatting guidelines commonly found when you write a research paper. Research publication shouldn't strictly be a test of one's writing skills, but acknowledging the importance of convincing peer reviewers of the credibility of your research means accepting the responsibility of preparing your research manuscript to commonly accepted standards in research.

As a result, seemingly insignificant things such as spelling mistakes, page numbers, and proper grammar can make a difference with a particularly strict reviewer. Even when you expect to develop a paper through reviewer comments and peer feedback, your manuscript should be as close to a polished final draft as you can make it prior to submission.

Qualitative researchers face particular challenges in convincing their target audience of the value and credibility of their subsequent analysis. Numbers and quantifiable concepts in quantitative studies are relatively easier to understand than their counterparts associated with qualitative methods . Think about how easy it is to make conclusions about the value of items at a store based on their prices, then imagine trying to compare those items based on their design, function, and effectiveness.

Qualitative research involves and requires these sorts of discussions. The goal of qualitative data analysis is to allow a qualitative researcher and their audience to make such determinations, but before the audience can accept these determinations, the process of conducting research that produces the qualitative analysis must first be seen as trustworthy. As a result, it is on the researcher to persuade their audience that their data collection process and subsequent analysis is rigorous.

Qualitative rigor refers to the meticulousness, consistency, and transparency of the research. It is the application of systematic, disciplined, and stringent methods to ensure the credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability of research findings. In qualitative inquiry, these attributes ensure the research accurately reflects the phenomenon it is intended to represent, that its findings can be understood or used by others, and that its processes and results are open to scrutiny and validation.

Transparency

It is easier to believe the information presented to you if there is a rigorous analysis process behind that information, and if that process is explicitly detailed. The same is true for qualitative research results, making transparency a key element in qualitative research methodologies. Transparency is a fundamental aspect of rigor in qualitative research. It involves the clear, detailed, and explicit documentation of all stages of the research process. This allows other researchers to understand, evaluate, replicate, and build upon the study. Transparency in qualitative research is essential for maintaining rigor, trustworthiness, and ethical integrity. By being transparent, researchers allow their work to be scrutinized, critiqued, and improved upon, contributing to the ongoing development and refinement of knowledge in their field.

Research papers are only as useful as their audience in the scientific community is wide. To reach that audience, a paper needs to pass the peer review process of an academic journal. However, the idea of having research published in peer-reviewed journals may seem daunting to newer researchers, so it's important to provide a guide on how an academic journal looks at your research paper as well as how to determine what is the right journal for your research.

In simple terms, a research article is good if it is accepted as credible and rigorous by the scientific community. A study that isn't seen as a valid contribution to scientific knowledge shouldn't be published; ultimately, it is up to peers within the field in which the study is being considered to determine the study's value. In established academic research, this determination is manifest in the peer review process. Journal editors at a peer-reviewed journal assign papers to reviewers who will determine the credibility of the research. A peer-reviewed article that completed this process and is published in a reputable journal can be seen as credible with novel research that can make a profound contribution to scientific knowledge.

The process of research publication

The process has been codified and standardized within the scholarly community to include three main stages. These stages include the initial submission stage where the editor reviews the relevance of the paper, the review stage where experts in your field offer feedback, and, if reviewers approve your paper, the copyediting stage where you work with the journal to prepare the paper for inclusion in their journal.

Publishing a research paper may seem like an opaque process where those involved with academic journals make arbitrary decisions about the worthiness of research manuscripts. In reality, reputable publications assign a rubric or a set of guidelines that reviewers need to keep in mind when they review a submission. These guidelines will most likely differ depending on the journal, but they fall into a number of typical categories that are applicable regardless of the research area or the type of methods employed in a research study, including the strength of the literature review , rigor in research methodology , and novelty of findings.

Choosing the right journal isn't simply a matter of which journal is the most famous or has the broadest reach. Many universities keep lists of prominent journals where graduate students and faculty members should publish a research paper , but oftentimes this list is determined by a journal's impact factor and their inclusion in major academic databases.

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This section is part of an entire guide. Use this table of contents to jump to any page in the guide.

Part 1: The Basics

• What is qualitative data?
• 10 examples of qualitative data
• Qualitative vs. quantitative research
• What is mixed methods research?
• Theoretical perspective
• Theoretical framework
• Literature reviews
• Research questions
• Conceptual framework
• Conceptual vs. theoretical framework
• Focus groups
• Observational research
• Case studies
• Survey research
• What is ethnographic research?
• Confidentiality and privacy in research
• Bias in research
• Power dynamics in research
• Reflexivity

Part 2: Handling Qualitative Data

• Research transcripts
• Field notes in research
• Research memos
• Survey data
• Images, audio, and video in qualitative research
• Coding qualitative data
• Coding frame
• Auto-coding and smart coding
• Organizing codes
• Content analysis
• Thematic analysis
• Thematic analysis vs. content analysis
• Narrative research
• Phenomenological research
• Discourse analysis
• Grounded theory
• Deductive reasoning
• What is inductive reasoning?
• Inductive vs. deductive reasoning
• What is data interpretation?
• Qualitative analysis software

Part 3: Presenting Qualitative Data

• Data visualization - What is it and why is it important?

Qualitative Data Collection, Analysis and Presentation: A Theoretical Overview

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Site navigation, scwk 242 - research methods, data analysis, and evaluation - spring 2013.

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Time: Wednesdays 6:00 pm to 8:45 pm

Location: BBC 126

Description

Basic concepts and models for research methodology applied to the analysis of data in social work. Emphasis is on quantitative analysis, using statistics software. Qualitative research is also incorporated. (Prerequisite: ScWk 240, 3 Units).

ScWk 242 Section 5 Syllabus (PDF)

Course outline for the Spring 2013 ScWk 242 Section 5 class

• ScWk 242 Section 5 Course Outline Spring 2013 [PDF]

Weekly Session Overhead Slides

• Session 1 Slides ppt - Introduction and Review [PPT]
• Session 1 Slides pdf - Introduction and Review [PDF]
• Session 2 Slides - Review of Qualitative Research and Analysis ppt [PPT]
• Session 2 Slides - Review of Qualitative Research and Analysis pdf [PDF]
• Session 3 Slides - Interviewing ppt version [PPT]
• Session 3 Slides - Interviewing pdf version [PDF]
• Transcultural Slides from HBSE (for Session 3 Reference Only) [PDF]
• Session 4 Slides - Focus Groups ppt version [PPT]
• Session 4 Slides - Focus Groups pdf version [PDF]
• Session 5 Slides - Observation - pptx version [PPTX]
• Session 5 Slides - Observation - pdf version [PDF]
• Session 6 Slides - Intro to Quantitative Research & SPSS ppt version [PPT]
• Session 6 Slides - Intro to Quantitative Research & SPSS pdf version [PDF]
• Session 7 Slides - Quantitative Analysis - Chi-Square [PPT]
• Session 7 Slides - Quantitative Analysis - Chi Square [PDF]
• Session 8 Slides - Descriptive Statistics Using SPSS - ppt version [PPT]
• Session 8 Slides - Descriptive Statistics Using SPSS - pdf version [PDF]
• Session 9 Slides - Inferential Statistics and t-tests - ppt version [PPTX]
• Session 9 Slides - Inferential Statistics and t-tests - pdf version [PDF]
• Session 10 Slides - Evaluation Research and Logic Models - pptx version [PPTX]
• Session 10 Slides - Evaluation Research and Logic Models - pdf version [PDF]
• Session 11 Slides - Program Evaluation and Data Analysis - pptx version [PPTX]
• Session 11 Slides - Program Evaluation and Analysis - pdf version [PDF]
• April 17 Class Slides - ANOVA and Linear Regression - ppt version [PPT]
• April 17 Class Slides - ANOVA and Linear Regression - pdf version [PDF]
• Session 14 Slides - Final Paper - pptx version [PPTX]
• Session 14 Slides - Final Paper - pdf version [PDF]
• Session 16 Slides - Wrap UP - pptx version [PPTX]
• Session 16 Slides - Wrap-Up - pdf version [PDF]

Online Reading Assignments

The attached word document includes links to all of the supplemental readings that are available online. The readings are listed weekly in chronological order.

• Document with Weekly Online Reading Links [DOCX]
• Session 2 Reading - Chapter 12 Qualitative Research [PDF]
• Session 2 Reading - Chapter 12 Multiple Choice Q & A [PDF]
• Session 2 Reading - Chapter 12 Study Q & A [PDF]
• Session 2 Reading - Chapter 17 Qualitative Research [PDF]
• Session 2 Reading - Chapter 17 Study Questions [PDF]
• Session 2 Readings - Chapter 17 Study Question Answers [PDF]
• Session 3 Reading - Turner - Qualitative Interview Guide [PDF]
• Session 4 Reading - Utah Department of SA & MH - Focus Groups [PDF]
• Session 4 Reading - New York State Teachers - Focus Groups [PDF]
• Session 5 Reading - Duke University Field Observation Guide - pdf [PDF]
• Weeks 10 & 11 Reading - Logic Model [PDF]
• Weeks 10 & 11 Reading - United Way [PDF]

Assignments

• Qualitative Analysis Lab 1 - Done on Class on 2/6 and due on 2/13 [DOCX]
• Qualitative Analysis Lab 2 - Done in Class on 2/13 and Due on 2/20 [DOCX]
• Qualitative Lab 3 - Done in Class on 2/20 [DOCX]
• CASA Writing Assistance Flyer - Place and Times [DOC]
• Quantitative Lab 1 Assignment: Chi-Square [DOC]
• Sample Table Formats [DOC]
• Session 8 - Class Exercise - Descriptive Statistics Using SPSS [DOCX]
• Session 8 Class Exercise - Copy of Questionnaire [PDF]
• Session 8 - Class Exercise SAMHSA Dataset [SAV]
• Session 8 SAMHSA Frequency Tables [DOCX]
• Lab 2 - Independent t-test - Done in-Class March 20 and due March 24 [DOC]
• Program Evaluation Paper Assignment - Due on April 17 [DOCX]
• Logic Model Template for Program Evaluation [DOC]
• Session 10 In-Class Exercise - Program Evaluation - pptx version [PPTX]
• Session 10 In-Class Exercise - Program Evaluation - pdf version [PDF]
• Session 11 In-Class Group Assignment - Program Evaluation [DOCX]
• April 17 In-Class Exercise - ANOVA [DOC]
• Study Guide for In-Class Exam on May 1 [DOC]
• Final Paper Assignment Instructors - Assignment Due on May 8 [DOC]

Online Resources

• APA Formatting 6th Edition Summary [DOC]
• Final Paper Self Grading/Evaluation Rubric [DOCX]
• Writing Guide [DOC]
• Writing Tips - Paraphrazing [DOCX]
• Writing Tips - Paraphrazing 2 [DOCX]

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Unpacking complexity in addressing the contribution of trauma to women’s ill health: a qualitative study of perspectives from general practice

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• ORCID record for Jennifer MacLellan
• ORCID record for Sharon Dixon
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• Figures & Data

Background There is an intricate relationship between the mind and the body in experiences of health and wellbeing. This can result in complexity of both symptom presentation and experience. Although the contribution of life trauma to illness experience is well described, this is not always fully recognised or addressed in healthcare encounters. Negotiating effective and acceptable trauma-informed conversations can be difficult for clinicians and patients.

Aim To explore the experience of primary care practitioners caring for women through a trauma-informed care lens.

Design and setting Qualitative study in the general practice setting of England, with reflections from representatives of a group with lived experience of trauma.

Method This was a secondary thematic analysis of 46 qualitative interviews conducted online/by telephone to explore primary care practitioners’ experiences of supporting women’s health needs in general practice, alongside consultation with representatives of a lived-experience group to contextualise the findings.

Results Four themes were constructed: ‘you prioritise physical symptoms because you don’t want to miss something’; you do not want to alienate people by saying the wrong thing; the system needs to support trauma-informed care; and delivering trauma-informed care takes work that can have an impact on practitioners.

Conclusion Primary care practitioners are aware of the difficulties in discussing the interface between trauma and illness with patients, and request support and guidance in how to negotiate this supportively. Lack of support for practitioners moves the focus of trauma-informed care from a whole-systems approach towards individual clinician–patient interactions.

• biopsychosocial models
• communication
• general practice
• trauma-informed care
• Introduction

As evident in the Women’s Health Strategy for England 1 and its underlying public consultation, 2 women’s health is complex and embedded in historical dismissal and stigma. There is an intricate relationship between the mind and the body in experiences of health and wellbeing. One facet of this complexity includes the possible contribution of trauma to the woman’s illness experience. The physical response to, and pathways of bodily damage as a result of, the hormonal environment of chronic stress has revealed links between unresolved emotional distress and autoimmune conditions. 3 Trauma has an impact on people in different ways. Although some people make positive adjustments, others experience mental ill health and/or develop physical symptoms from emotional distress. 4 This can result in complexity both in symptom presentation and health experience.

Trauma can result from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as harmful or life threatening and can include past experiences of care (including in maternity), adverse childhood events (ACEs), and other life experiences as an adult. ACEs are stressful or traumatic events that occur specifically during childhood or adolescence 5 and can include: abuse (physical, emotional, and sexual); neglect; living in a household with domestic violence, experience of illness, or bereavement. 6 In a systematic review and meta-analysis of 96 studies of adult health behaviours, the risk of poorer health outcomes (including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, and mental ill health) increased with the number of ACEs. 4 Experiences of trauma at any stage in life can cause lasting adverse effects on health. 3 In the UK, women are disproportionally affected by violence (twice as likely as men to experience domestic violence), 7 , 8 trauma, 9 , 10 and ill health, 11 , 12 highlighting the potential complexity of women’s health presentation.

Although the contribution of life trauma to illness experience is well described, primary care professionals do not always fully address it. Potential reasons include clinician concerns about missing a serious illness in a complex presentation or about alienating or upsetting the patient. 11 Addressing trauma often necessitates introducing conversations about the link between mind and body, which can be difficult to navigate. Significant challenges and uncertainties reside in how best to manage the link between mind and body in communication with patients and in healthcare pathways. Qualitative research indicates that primary care professionals can find it challenging to navigate this mind–body presentation. Suggestions from primary care professionals that physical symptoms are amplified by (or a manifestation of) distress can be experienced as dismissal and invalidation by patients. 13 – 15 Attempts to bridge these health needs are therefore not always experienced as supportive. This illustrates the potential challenges of negotiating trauma-informed conversations in ways that are experienced as acceptable and supportive by patients.

How this fits in

Trauma-informed care is a framework founded on five core practices: safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment. These can be used to address the impact of trauma on patients and healthcare professionals and prevent re-traumatisation in healthcare services. 16 However, definitions, guidance, practitioner training, delivery, and support for trauma-informed approaches vary between healthcare settings according to local-level funding priorities with implementation described as disjointed. 16 Little is known about how healthcare professionals experience trying to effectively deliver trauma-informed care. The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of primary care practitioners caring for women through a trauma-informed care lens.

This study was a secondary analysis of qualitative interview data gathered to explore primary care practitioners’ experiences of supporting women’s health needs in primary care. Between March and September 2022, we interviewed a sample of 46 primary care practitioners across England (GPs n = 31, nurses n = 9, other professionals n = 6, with an average of 12 years’ experience [1 to 30 years], 41/46 female), ensuring representation from practices working in areas of deprivation where health inequalities and multimorbidity are significant challenges. Detailed methods and participant characteristics of the parent study are reported elsewhere. 17

The original topic guide was developed by three authors in response to a perceived gap in knowledge about women’s health care in primary care and commissioned by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Policy Research Programme. Data were collected through single-episode, one-to-one interviews with fully informed consent. They were conducted virtually online or by telephone by two experienced qualitative researchers and audio-recorded. These were transcribed verbatim, checked against the original recording, and thematically analysed.

The team then undertook a focused enquiry using secondary thematic analysis of the dataset to explore primary care professionals’ navigation of women’s experiences of distress as a contribution to their symptoms. 18 We recoded the transcripts line-by-line where distress, emotional, or psychological impact or contribution to health experience was mentioned. We discussed the constructed data categories within the research team to create interpretive themes. We reflected on these themes with representatives of three charities supporting women with significant experience of historical and contemporary trauma to add a lived-experience perspective to the data.

Four themes were constructed from the data:

‘you prioritise physical symptoms because you don’t want to miss something’;

you do not want to alienate people by saying the wrong thing;

the system needs to support trauma-informed care; and

delivering trauma-informed care takes work that can have an impact on practitioners.

Theme 1: ‘you prioritise physical symptoms because you don’t want to miss something’ (PC30, female [F], GP for 5 years)

Practitioners described women’s health consultations as often complex and difficult to manage in a single, constrained time slot. A significant concern was the fear of missing a physical condition requiring specific or prompt treatment as many women’s health complaints could present with similar but vague symptomatology and could suggest multiple possible diagnoses. Some participants reflected that a challenge of navigating diagnostic processes, by first excluding potential causes that need specific interventions such as cancer, meant the contribution of distress to physical symptoms was pushed down the list of considerations: ‘It’s definitely sort of a symptom sieve to start with, and to adequately hear your patient and really hear them and really listen to what they’re saying […] There are many things that are difficult to do in ten minutes, but I … women’s health is particularly difficult.’ (PC17, F, advanced nurse practitioner [ANP] for more than 15 years) ‘They’re often quite vague symptoms: bloating, things like that, so you either have a very low index of suspicion and you’re seeing ca-125s [blood test that may indicate ovarian cancer] and you’re scanning everybody, or things get missed, and [sighs] yeah, it can be very challenging and obviously if you miss something like that it’s devastating for everybody involved, but it’s very difficult.’ (PC12, F, GP for more than 15 years)

Participants described how investigation pathways move through a hierarchy of potential causes and may involve a stepped process that did not always yield a confirmatory or unifying diagnosis. This meant that the participants had to manage patients’ expectations of diagnosis throughout this process.

Theme 2: you do not want to alienate people by saying the wrong thing

Some felt that a cultural shift was needed for the wider healthcare system to acknowledge the mind–body interplay as a legitimate expression of distress, to support practitioners to discuss this with their patients along their care pathway, and to provide timely access to psychological support services: ‘Perhaps some of training for staff would be about how you talk about the connection between your brain and your body […] without sounding dismissive and actually, training individuals to become more sensitive to these types of, conversations.’ (PC46, male [M], GP for 15 years)

However, some felt that patients were not always receptive to recognising the contribution of emotions or past experiences to physical symptoms, the idea of an integral link between mind and body, or the offer of psychological support to cope with the distress of physical symptoms. Some participants were worried about alienating women who might interpret this suggestion as devaluing or de-legitimising their symptom experience, and were therefore sometimes unsure when or how to navigate this: ‘I don’t think many patients like it when we end up going down that route when it comes to pain, any pain, not just pelvic pain in itself, because they want a diagnosis of some form or another, whatever it’s called, rather than being given some antidepressants or some counselling.’ (PC18, F, GP for 10 years)

Participants described the essential first step to be validation of the woman’s experience, emphasising understanding and genuine belief in the symptoms as ‘real’ (although perhaps currently unexplained) before exploring the impact of trauma or life stress in its aetiology: ‘It’s just spending the time with them and actually acknowledging, yes the pain is real, but are we not just saying you know, “you’ve got pain and we can’t find any cause for it”, “the pain is actually real”, and what we can do is maybe go down the route of psychological sort of therapy for that, that might be the best route of managing it.’ (PC18, F, GP for 10 years) ‘The first lady I was talking about absolutely wasn’t having any of it […] I got her some interesting resources […] and I just mis-pitched it […] the fact that this is her body feeling overwhelmed and feeling overwhelmed with the difficulties in her life and how to explain that in a way that seems scientific … it’s quite difficult, isn’t it?’ (PC14, F, GP for 1 year)

Healthcare professionals were aware and worried that exploring the contribution of trauma or distress in the physical symptom experience and that physical and emotional symptoms can coexist was not always well received. Restricted time in consultations highlighted the need for resources that could support this mind–body understanding in a positive and affirming way for the patient: ‘Often there is something organic, or something organic that has started it off, but then it often becomes this kind of complex combination of physical and then also psychological symptoms together, and I think kind of having resources to explain how psychological symptoms can impact pelvic pain […] I think kind of having good resources to try and back up what I’m saying would be quite helpful.’ (PC21, F, GP for more than 20 years)

Participants described how the net effect of these considerations could result in practitioners (inadvertently) avoiding discussion of the contribution of distress in the illness presentation: ‘ […] I think you can shut it down easily and not get emotionally involved, but you do not actually solve any of the issues unless they are straight up, simple, physical problems that you can just treat, but for the most part it doesn’t work very well.’ (PC30, F, GP for 5 years)

Participants recognised the importance of a trauma-informed approach in the complex and holistic care needs of women’s health. This extended to considerations about trauma-informed approaches to physical examination and how this could be enabled. Some highlighted the unique position of the primary care practitioner, in a potentially protracted diagnostic or support pathway, to communicate the contribution of distress in a supportive and helpful way to their patients.

Theme 3: the system needs to support trauma-informed care

Participants described four systemic challenges to the provision of trauma-informed care:

inadequate time allocated for appointments;

waiting times for specialist practitioner review in secondary care;

limited access to services; and

providing care for women returning from secondary care without a unifying diagnosis.

The challenges of time were frequently reported by participants: ‘I already know that I can’t do everything for you [the patient] in ten minutes, which isn’t always like a nice feeling for me, because we want to be able to help and you know do that within the time … who knows when they’ll be able to get an appointment again or you don’t want it to be frustrating for them, but equally you don’t want to rush yourself.’ (PC35, F, GP for less than 6 months) ‘They come back two months later and say, “I’ve still … I’m still … still haven’t seen the hospital”, and that there’s a certain amount of workload in primary care just because of … just because secondary care can’t take that on.’ (PC23, M, GP for more than 20 years)

In some areas they reported limited access to services such as counselling or psychological support services and community gynaecology because of local funding models and the challenges of providing care for women returning from secondary care without a unifying diagnosis. This often led to practitioners ‘holding the distress’ of the woman (see theme 4). Despite the challenges identified, participants described how they worked within the system constraints to offer the best service for their patients, for example, planning activities across multiple appointments: ‘In fifteen minutes it’s quite challenging, or if I’m trying to examine somebody […] that’s difficult, that’s when I sometimes ask them […] to come back for the examination so that I can do all the other things that are needed.’ (PC25, F, GP for 25 years)

Participants spoke of the structural supports that were in place that worked well in their efforts to deliver trauma-informed care, such as support networks, the ‘advice and guidance’ contact service to access secondary care (a system where GPs can access specialist advice before or instead of referral), and working with social prescribers (link workers who help patients to access non-medical support services in their community): ‘I mean advice and guidance [are] probably helpful I think, you write and you say, “What do I do?” and they tell you, and you then say to the patient, “this is what the specialist has said”, and that’s great, and that’s a really good idea.’ (PC23, M, GP for more than 20 years) ‘[Access to a social prescriber] is definitely making a difference; I don’t know what we did before to be quite honest. I don’t know what we would do because it’s just improved the quality of life for our patients, and it’s just helped us cope because you know we often see mental health problems, social problems, and with such a limited time constraint, limited resources, now that investment has been put in, it is definitely making a difference.’ (PC16, F, ANP for more than 18 years)

Theme 4: delivering trauma-informed care takes work and can have an impact on practitioners

Taking a trauma-informed approach relied heavily on the practitioner–patient relationship and some felt that the impact on practitioners was not always accounted for. The work involved in taking a trauma-informed approach to care had an impact on clinician workload. When they were able to navigate this challenge participants reported job satisfaction that was a positive impact. Conversely, when participants were unable to deliver the care they aspired to and believed they should, this had a negative impact. Protracted routes to diagnosis (or not getting a diagnosis), exacerbated by long waits to access specialist review in secondary care, left participants ‘holding the distress’ of women managing symptoms while they waited for a management plan: ‘I mean typically what happens is when a referral is done, the patient is waiting three, four, five months to be seen sometimes, but the patient’s still got those symptoms, so what do they do?’ (PC18, F, GP for 10 years) ‘So pain is complex. I think every pain service in the country is poorly funded and poorly accessible […] The challenge we have is these patients are constantly accessing us and, you know, I don’t want to label anything but they do end up becoming frequent attenders, which you know … and all we are is becoming a holding person in all of this.’ (PC46, M, GP for 15 years)

This increased the pressure on primary care practitioners who were operating without adequate system support. Although participants knew that managing uncertainty was integral to the role of the primary care practitioner, holding distress added to the challenge of appropriately broaching or exploring the mind–body link. Participants described feeling overwhelmed and personally affected by managing the expectations of patients held in limbo and holding their distress: ‘Women who have complex, like intractable symptoms that have been investigated and no one’s really come up with anything […] it’s more psycho-social input that’s needed, and they’ve seen a gynaecologist and they’re still struggling and there’s not really a solution, and so they’re … they’re the ones who you think, “oh my gosh, I … I’m … I’m not sure what I can offer … offer you”.’ (PC34, F, GP for 15 years) ‘I mean women’s health is a prime one, it causes so much anxiety, stress, impact on the family, and I think with the complexities around the referral pathways and who’s doing what, which has been one of my biggest stresses, people can fall through the gaps very easily.’ (PC26, F, GP for 5 years)

Participants sought support from colleagues within their daily work routines to reflect on clinical questions or patients with complex cases. However, some felt that there were limited support services for practitioners’ mental wellbeing in a more formalised and structured way: ‘We have our annual appraisal but that is very much to make sure that we’re not total lunatics […] but other than that […] they do support us, but they … you know it’s once a year, there’s no capacity to debrief on individual challenging cases or anything like that, it’s very much to check-in that we are sort of on the rails.’ (PC30, F, GP for 5 years)

Participants described how not being able to deliver high-quality, holistic care because of structural constraints was unsatisfying and challenging: ‘I was so unhappy in my previous job really, I’d say we still had support, but the patients were a lot more demanding and it just comes with that, you know a lot more child protection issues safeguarding and it … you know, it’s just a really challenging job and that, and not necessary work satisfying either.’ (PC04, F, GP for 3 years)

Lack of personal and systems support for practitioners moves the focus of trauma-informed care from a whole-systems approach to the clinician–patient interaction.

Our findings indicate that clinicians are aware of the contribution of trauma and distress to the presentation of physical symptomatology within women’s health consultations but that conversations about this could be difficult. Some participants felt confident and willing to discuss the role of distress in symptom presentation; others felt that these conversations were difficult and sometimes avoided the topic. Constraints such as limited time in consultations and the training and resources to facilitate discussions about the minded-body (the interconnection of physical and emotional health) and the role of trauma and distress could mean that clinicians did not always talk to patients about the impact of distress. This was exacerbated by system constraints such as limited support services for referral. Practitioners described building support mechanisms for themselves at work through debrief and clinical conversations with colleagues but told us that there were no formal supervision or support services routinely available for practitioners. The heavy work and emotional labour within an unsupportive system was described as contributing to practitioner frustration and burnout. Although patient relationships were framed within a trauma-informed lens, the organisational configuration was not always supportive to a trauma-informed approach.

Strengths and limitations

The use of secondary analysis has allowed us to conduct a focused analysis on a rich dataset of primary care professionals’ interviews. As this was done within the project timeline by the original research team, potential ethical concerns about the impact of the sociopolitical context that often accompanies secondary analysis were mitigated. 18 We were able to minimise participant burden and engage with a targeted group of women for whom trauma-informed care and its delivery has an immediate impact.

The principal limitation of our study is the restrictions offered by the original interview scope and guiding questions of the parent study that focused on women’s health. We are unable to report on experience in other areas of health care or by gender of care provider as this is unexplored. Gender was recorded; there were four male and 42 female responders. We purposively selected practitioners with an interest in women’s health rather than sampling an equally gender-split sample to derive patterns of experience that could be attributed to gender issues.

Comparison with existing literature

The link between trauma and ill health is well discussed in the literature, as are the principles of trauma-informed care. However, there appears to be little evidence of the clinician’s experience in discussing the interface between trauma and complexity with patients. The complexity of women’s health experiences challenges a dualistic approach to care and could respond better to the continuity model of primary care. 19 Practitioners in our data actively enacted the principles of trauma-informed care (such as safety, trustworthiness, and collaboration) in their personal practice with women. 16 However, the structural configuration of primary care services could complicate these care aspirations including when resources were limited or services were not flexible enough to support practitioner autonomy, which could hinder opportunities for timely care or follow-up. This could erode the practitioner’s efforts to deliver trauma-informed care, with potential consequences for both patients and clinicians. Such structural constraints in a climate of overwork are powerful sources of moral distress and burnout in studies of nurses, midwives, and doctors. 20 – 23 The risk of exposing practitioners to such moral distress can lead to the experience of vicarious trauma and reduced job satisfaction as they navigate the challenge of exploring the minded-body link with patients on their illness journey. 24 , 25 Primary care practitioners held women’s distress while they waited for specific therapies or supports, and yet the practitioners did not have adequate formal support systems to take care of their own wellbeing. This finding resonates with Pereira Gray et al , 25 who suggest that the UK shortage of GPs, erosion of continuity of care, sustained increase of remote consultation methods, and lack of structural support in the system may exacerbate challenges faced by practitioners to provide high-quality care. 26 – 28

Implications for research and practice

Our findings suggest that moving towards a trauma-informed systems-level approach would support integration of psychological support within multiple care pathways. A coordinated systems approach should support an integrated and holistic approach rather than encouraging a dichotomising split between physical or psychological services. Our findings suggest that this model would also support the wellbeing of practitioners delivering care and may have an impact on staff retention, making this a critical consideration at all system and service levels from individuals to practices to funders and commissioners. 28 , 29 However, less is known about how to enact or enable trauma-informed care at a systems level. 16 More research is needed about how to implement and support equitable, proportionate trauma-informed care in practice. This includes learning how to actively nurture equitable care within services, practices, and within primary care networks. At a funding and commissioning level, autonomy and equitable work need to be valued and enabled, and this requires policy attention; simplistic metrics of care such as numbers seen or a narrow focus on numerically quantifiable access will not capture either the impact on patients or practitioners. 28 Nor will this capture the contacts and appointments that did not happen. Furthermore, critical to effective equitable care is that practitioners need meaningful access to services that they can refer into and that will respond promptly and supportively to the needs identified. Work in areas of care such as female genital mutilation and domestic violence and abuse demonstrate that having acceptable accessible services to refer into enabled inquiry and compassionate care. 30 , 31 It is an ethical prerogative that trauma-informed enquiry is supported by trauma-informed services and support. Finally, support for staff is essential and the responsibility for this should not be devolved to individuals but commissioned and provided for. This contrasts with current policy, such as the wellbeing Quality and Outcomes Framework indicators that arguably devolve the responsibility for wellbeing to those in need of wellbeing support, without offering any tangible resources.

Healthcare professionals are aware of the difficulties in discussing the interface between trauma and complexity with patients 32 and our work shows they are requesting support and guidance in how to negotiate this supportively. The British Medical Association moral injury report 22 recommends systems changes that map onto the principles of trauma-informed care, including increased staffing, streamlining of bureaucracy, open and sharing work cultures, and provision of support for employees. However, although these recommendations acknowledge the problem and offer solutions, there is no requirement for organisations to address these structural concerns. Lack of these system supports for practitioners moves the focus of trauma-informed care from a whole-systems approach to the clinician–patient interaction. 16

To seek lived-experience perspectives on our findings, 33 we spoke with three representatives of charities supporting survival sex workers (SSW) in different regions of England as an exemplar vulnerable group with significant experience of historical and ongoing trauma. They told us how women experience stigma and are afraid of disclosure and confidentiality, particularly if their children have been removed and placed into social care. The charity representatives described how women engaged in SSW rarely sought medical care or achieved registration at a general practice surgery because of lifestyle circumstances and stigmatising experiences.

We asked what trauma-informed care looked like for their service and asked them to reflect on our findings. They recommended a systems-level approach to the delivery of trauma-informed services across the health service. Barriers to access were described as starting at the front door of the general practice surgery with the reaction of the receptionist. A lack of confidentiality in the reception area, closed consulting room doors, short consultation times, and the predominance of digital access methods for appointments were also cited. Beyond these, they suggested responsive, transparent pathways into support services for vulnerable women or those living in extreme circumstances would illustrate a trauma-informed approach to services. Individual practitioners were credited with adopting a trustworthy, trauma-informed approach but charity representatives, in consultation with the women they support, felt that the healthcare system could counteract individual good practice.

• Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the contributions of our Public Involvement participants and express our thanks for the insights they shared with the research team.

This study was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Policy Research Programme (NIHR202450). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.

Ethical approval

This study has received ethical approval from the Health Research Authority (ref 22/HRA/0985).

The authors do not have ethical permission to share their dataset beyond the study team.

Freely submitted; externally peer reviewed.

Competing interests

The authors have declared no competing interests.

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• Received January 12, 2024.
• Revision requested February 19, 2024.
• Accepted April 9, 2024.
• © The Authors

This article is Open Access: CC BY 4.0 licence ( http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ ).

• Department of Health and Social Care
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• Pearson WS ,
• Petruccelli K ,
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• Office for National Statistics (ONS)
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