Qualitative methods Lecture 5

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Qualitative methodsLecture 5

• Analysis and interpretation of qualitative data

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Today

• Summing up
• The quality of the interview
• The good interviewer
• Analysis of the interview from last time
• Question types
• Grounded Theory and coding procedures
• open coding and red lights in the interview
  with mother

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Quality criteria

• The extent
• Short questions, long answers
• Follow up and clarify
• Interpreted throughout the interview
• Verification of interpretations
• self-communication

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Coding

• Coding represents the operations by which
  data are broken down, conceptualized, and put
  back together in new ways
• Strauss and Corbin, 1990

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Naming phenomena

• Science could not exist without concepts
• by the very act of naming phenomina, we fix
  continuing attention on them
• Open coding the naming and categorizing of data
• data are broken down
• Strauss and Corbin, 1990, p. 62

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What is scientific knowledge?

• actually scientific knowledge is in large
  part an invention or development rather than an
  imitation concepts, hypotheses, and theories are
  not found ready-made in reality but must be
  constructed
• (Diesing (1971, p. 14) quoted in Strauss and
  Corbin, 1990, p. 59)

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Procedures

• Two procedures
• the making of comparisons
• asking questions
• Strauss and Corbins example the Lady in red
• a work site, watching, kitchen work, information
  passing, unintrusiveness, efficiency, monitoring,
  quality, timing of service, information
  gathering, conferring, experienced

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Categorizing

• How can these words be caracterised in a way that
  they give more overview?
• Do the words belong together or are they
  different?
• What is at stake?
• Assess and maintain the flow of work
• types of work for assessing and maintaining the
  work flow

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Naming a category

• experience
• Strauss og Corbins suggestion Food
  Orchestrator
• own invention
• have to create the categories yourself (in
  combination with all ready existing categories)
• Purpose so that you can remember it, think
  about it, and most of all begin to develop it
  analytically

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Overview of subcategories

• A breakdown of the subcategory types of work
• can be dimensionalised
• frequency of performance, (often -- seldom)
• duration, (a short time -- a long time)
• how it is carried out, (with intensity --
  superficially)
• who else is involved, (no one -- many people)
• when it is performed, etc.

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Various approaches

• Line-by-line analysis
• phrase by prase, word by word
• (important in the beginning to generate
  categories
• -- later larger perspective)
• finally the whole document
• What seems to be going on here?
• Is this document the same or different from
  previous documents?

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Concepts

• Concepts are basic building blocs to theory
• Open coding is the analytic process, where
  concepts are identified and developed with a
  point of departure in their own qualities and
  dimensions
• Is done by asking questions to data
• And by comparing with other data in order to find
  differences and similarities in relation to other
  cases or other incidents where the phenomenon
  appears

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Kvales ideas of methods of analysis

• There is no magic tool
• Only techniques of analysis
• The central interview analysis is still the task
  of the researcher, just as the thematical
  questions he or she has asked right from the
  beginning of the survey and followed through
  research design, interview and transcription

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6 steps of analysis

• The interviewees describe their lifeworld in the
  interview
• The interviewees discover new relations
  themselves
• The interviewer condenses and interpretes the
  interview during the interview
• The transcribed interview is interpreted by the
  interviewer possibly with others
  ______________________________
• 5) Repeat interview (possibly)
• 6) Action (possibly)

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5 methods to interview analysis

• Meaning Condensation
• Meaning Categorisation
• Narrative structuring
• Meaning interpretation
• Ad hoc-methods

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Form of the Analysis

• The result of the analysis demands less space
  than the original interview text by all kinds of
  methods except the interpretation
• Form
• Meaning condensation, interpretation and
  narrative analyses words, possibly models
• Meaning Categorisation or -, which indicates
  whether a phenomenon is present or not
• Or as e.g. at number between 1 and 5 (intensity)

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Meaning Condensation

• Long statements are summarised to short
  statements
• Meaning Categorisation
• The interview is coded in categories
• Reduces and structures an extensive text to few
  tables and models
• categories created before or during the analysis

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Narrative structuring of meaning

• A sequence in time, a pattern of happenings
• A social dimension, someone tells something to
  someone
• A meaning a plot which gives the story a point
  and makes it an entity

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Meaning interpretation

• More encompassing and more in depth than the
  analysis
• Goes further than what is said directly works
  out structures of signification and relations
• Demands a certain distance
• Is what is being said true?

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Ad hoc analysis

• Very common
• Combination of methods and techniques for the
  creation of meaning
• Overall impression
• Return to special sequences
• Quantify some phenomena
• Think of metaphores to grasp the meaning
• Visualise results in diagrams, tables, etc.

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Next time

• Please read the interview with Mrs. Rowe.
• What is her relation to fastfood?
• text from Kvale on the plurality of interpretion