Chapter 13 Summary

Qualitative Analysis

• Qualitative analysis is heavily dependent on the researcher’s analytic and integrative skills and personal knowledge of the social context where the data is collected.
• The emphasis is on “sense making” or understanding a phenomenon.

Grounded Theory

• Grounded theory is the inductive theory of interpreting recorded data about a social phenomenon to build theories about that phenomenon.
• Glaser and Strauss (1967) developed technique and refined by Strauss and Corbin (1990).
• Specific coding techniques included a process of classifying and categorizing text data segments into a set of codes (concepts), categories (constructs) and relationships.
• The interpretations are “grounded in” or based on observed empirical data.
• Theory requires researchers suspend any preexisting theoretical expectations or biases before data analysis, and let the data dictate the formulation of the theory.

Open Coding

• Open coding is a process aimed at identifying concepts or key ideas that are hidden within textual data, which are potentially related to the phenomenon of interest.
• Researcher examines raw textual data line by line to identify discrete events, incidents, ideas, actions, perceptions and interactions of relevance that are coded as concepts.
• Once a basic set of concepts are identified, these concepts can then can be used to code the remainder of the data while simultaneously looking for new concepts and refining old.
• It is important to identify recognizable characteristics of each concept so that similar concepts can be grouped together later.
• This coding technique is called “open” because the researcher is open to and actively seeking new concepts relevant to the phenomenon.
• Similar concepts are grouped in higher order categories, which are broad and generalizable to build a “big picture.”

Axial Coding

• Axial coding is where the categories and subcategories are assembled into casual relationships or hypotheses that can tentatively explain the phenomenon of interest.
• Axal coding while distinct from open coding, can be performed simultaneously.
• Relationships between categories may be clearly evident in the data or may be more subtle and implicit.
• Coding can help understand which categories represent conditions, actions/interactions and consequences. Once identified, theoretical propositions state to emerge and researchers can start explaining why a phenomenon occurs, under what conditions and with what consequences.

Selective Coding

• Selective coding involves identifying a central category or core variable and systematically and logically relating this central category to other categories.
• The central category can evolve from existing categories or can he a higher order category that subsumes previously coded categories.
• Selective coding limits the range of analysis, and makes it move fast.
• Open, axial and selective coding may proceed simultaneously.
• Coding of new data and theory refinement continues until theoretical saturation is reached.
• Constant comparison implies continuous rearrangement, aggregation and refinement of categories, relationships and interpretations based on increasing depth of understanding.
• Storylining – categories and relationships are used to explicate and/or refine a story of the observed phenomenon.
• Memoing – process of using memos to discover patterns and relationships between categories using two-by-two tables, diagrams or figures.
• Concept Mapping – is a graphic representation of concepts and relationships between those concepts.

Content Analysis

• Content analysis is the systematic analysis of the cenote of a text in a quantitative or qualitative manner.
  • Researcher begins by sampling a selected set of texts for analysis.
  • Researcher identifies and applies rules to divide each text into segments that can be treated as separate units of analysis.
  • Researched constructs and applies one or more concepts to each unitized text segment in a process called coding.
  • Coded data is analyzed, often both quantitatively and qualitatively, to determine which themes occur most frequently, in what context and how they are related to each other.
• Sentiment analysis is a technique used to capture people’s opinion or attitude toward an object, person or phenomenon.
• Content analysis lacks a set of systematic procedures that would allow the analysis to be replicated.
• Content analysis coding process is restricted to the information available in text form and sampling must be done carefully to avoid bias.

Hermeneutic Analysis

• Hermeneutic analysis is a special type of content analysis where the researched tries to “interpret” the subjective meaning of a given text within its socio-historic contest.
• This method assumes the written texts narrate an author’s experience within a socio-historic context and should be interpreted as such within that context.
• Biblical hermeneutics refers to the interpretation of written texts, especially in the areas of literation, religion and law (such as the Bible).