Qualitative Data Analysis

Data Analysis

The phrase qualitative analysis in the physical sciences, and in some quantitative research in the social sciences, refers to categorical rather than numerical analysis. For example, qualitative analysis in chemistry simply determines what elements are present in a solution, while quantitative analysis also measures the amount of each element. Some quantitative researchers have assumed that this distinction also applies to the social sciences—that qualitative analysis deals with data that are simply categorized, rather than measured numerically, and that the basic principles of quantitative research can be applied to both. This represents a profound misunderstanding of qualitative research and analysis, which rests on quite different premises from quantitative research, and uses distinct strategies for analyzing data.

These strategies are grounded in the primarily inductive, rather than hypothesis testing, nature of qualitative research. This, in turn, is shaped by the nature of qualitative data. Such data are primarily descriptions of what people did or said in particular contexts—either observations of actual settings and events or transcripts of interviews. Instead of converting these descriptions to variables and measuring or correlating these, as quantitative researchers do, qualitative researchers retain the data in their original, descriptive form and analyze these in ways that, at least to a greater extent than in quantitative research, retain their narrative, contextualized character. Qualitative research reports tend to contain many verbatim quotes and descriptions, and the analysis process is to a substantial extent devoted to selecting these as well as to aggregating, comparing, and summarizing them. The use of numbers, to make more precise statements of how often something happened or how many participants reported a particular experience or event, is legitimate and common in qualitative research, but such uses are supplementary to the primary descriptive and interpretive goals of analysis.

Because of the inductive character of qualitative research, and its particularistic focus, data [Page 1336]analysis is not a “stage” that occurs in a sequential order with theorizing, research design, data collection, and writing up results. Data analysis should begin as soon as any data are collected and should be continued as long as any significant questions remain about the meaning and implications of the data. Although the relative emphasis on the different aspects of the research process varies over time, they are not chronologically separated components of a linear series.

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