Advanced Qualitative Data Analysis

Who is this course for?

This course is designed for participants who wish to acquire methodological expertise in qualitative data analysis generally and, more specifically, widen their understanding and applied skills in conducting QCA, TA, CCA and GT in NVivo. The course will benefit to participants who plan to conduct one of the above method in their PhD or postdoctoral research, and to those wanting to generally broaden their area of methodological expertise in qualitative research. The course responds well to participants that have collected their data and want to apply the methods’ coding and analytic procedures on their dataset as well as those who don’t have data yet. 

Contribution of this course

Amongst the methods available to analyse qualitative data qualitatively, the four methods which this course is based on have been widely used across the social sciences. Their procedures to carry out analysis are straightforward, which makes the analytic journey transparent, traceable, and auditable. Each method is also unique in its own right, in that each one suits a particular type of research questions; responds to specific objectives; requires a distinct sampling strategy; implements specific coding and analytical procedures; and generates concrete findings. The course also sheds light on some of the malpractices and misrepresentations that the four methods suffer from in the qualitative literature, both because of the lack of standardised training in qualitative analysis and researchers’ obscured reporting. To this end, the course’s daily assignment involve that participants appraise the quality of reporting of published studies that used the four methods.

Learning objectives

At the end of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the aim, objectives, and expected outcomes of QCA, TA, CCA and GT
2. Demonstrate how each method suits a given research design
3. Implement each method’s coding and analytic procedures in NVivo
4. Generate graphic displays that match each method’s findings
5. Appraise the quality of reporting of studies that used the four methods
6. Propose designs where methods integration is feasible

Day 1 Qualitative content analysis (Schreier, 2012): Day 1 opens with qualitative content analysis as proposed by Schreier (2012). Qualitative content analysis is a method that is particularly suited for studies that aim to explore and then describe the manifest and latent meaning of categories in text, multimedia, pictures, and social media data. In the first part of the class, we review the methodological tenets that distinguish the quantitative from the qualitative approach to content analysis and proceed with looking at sampling requirements, coding units vs unit of analysis, and the building of a coding frame where categories are organised. This leads us to conduct the initial phase of data coding and conduct a preliminary reliability check to assess the categories adequacy to capture meaning in the data. In the second part of the class, we move to NVivo where we aggregate categories in sets and cross-tabulate them in the search of coding co-occurrence. We display the results in models where we use both qualitative and quantitative indicators to show the coding occurrence across categories.

Day 2 Thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998): Thematic analysis is indisputably a popular method used by qualitative researchers in the social sciences. However, when looking at the different approaches to thematic analysis, Boyatzis' approach is one of the very few that has formalised its procedures in a series of clearly-defined stages known as seeing and encoding themes, codes development, and scoring / clustering of themes. We open the class by looking at the concepts of pattern recognition and labelling consistency which are fundamental in Boyatzis’ understanding of how a theme is first seen, recognised, and then consistently ascribed the same meaning by the researcher. In the second part of the class, we move to NVivo where we cross-tabulate codes in matrices to find out where coding across themes overlaps. Instances of coding co-occurrence are examined and conceptual associations are formalised in relationship nodes, NVivo's unique feature to put forward propositions, and formulate / falsify hypotheses.

Day 3 Cross-case analysis (Miles & Huberman, 1994): Amongst the different schools of case study research, the strategies proposed by Miles and Huberman for within- and cross-case analysis have had a tremendous impact in the way qualitative researchers examine similarities and differences across cases, so to make generalisable claims and promoting theoretical elaboration. The first part of the class centres on the first stage of cross-case analysis, that is, a description of what is going on in each case and explanations about why the phenomenon occurs the way it does. We then move on with identifying the overall pattern that gives explanation to the overall phenomenon and we formulate propositions about what could happened if similar circumstances would be met elsewhere. In the second half of the class, we reproduce these stages in NVivo using matrix queries, memos, see also links, relationship nodes and the model.

Day 4 Grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998): Grounded theory is often claimed to be the method of choice by many qualitative researchers when conducting qualitative analysis. However, under scrutiny, only a scarce amount of studies actually implements the tenets proposed by the different schools of GT. The malpractice of labelling a study "a grounded theory" to legitimise one’s work while none of the methodology's tenets have been implemented, and the negative impact that this malpractice has had on the GT representation in academia, opens the first part of the class. In NVivo we examine the association between open coding and theoretical sampling in the generation of categories until saturation is reached. In the second part of the class, the categories of axial coding are applied onto the data and patterns of relationships between categories are identified. We conclude the class with the phase of selective coding, where a core category is identified and theoretical hypotheses are formalised using relationship nodes.

Day 5 Integration & quality appraisal: Day 5 addresses the possibilities for methods integration and proposes some tools to assess the quality of qualitative analysis. The class opens with a comparative overview of the similarities and differences of the four methods along the epistemological spectrum. This overview brings us to assess how different stances regarding knowledge creation inevitably influence the type of research questions asked, the type of analytic devices each method uses, and the level of abstraction reached in the results they generate. We then look at how, in the analytic process, some of the methods’ features – i.e. approaches to codes generation, sampling strategy, means to validate findings - may be combined in a single study only and when this is methodologically justified. In the second half of the class, we review some appraisal tools that have been proposed in the qualitative literature to assess the quality of qualitative analysis.

Teaching & data

Teaching methods include lectures, guided exercises with NVivo, and group work. All four methods will be taught using sample data provided by the instructor. Participants that have their own data are welcomed to use them during the guided exercises. For those wishing to develop their appraisal skills, the daily assignments, which consist in assessing the quality of reporting of published studies that used the four methods, are proposed outside class hours.

Methodological requirements

This course requires understanding of the philosophy underlying critical realist epistemology and some of its associated methods to analyse qualitative data. Previous experience in analysing qualitative data is necessary including coding and managing a coding scheme; seeking patterns across themes and cases; formalising associations in propositions or falsifying hypotheses against empirical material; representing findings in graphic displays and recording the analytic process in memos. If you have done all the above, you are ready to take this course. Note that merely identifying themes in qualitative data and reporting these using quotes is no analysis, and critically falls below the requirements of this course. If you don’t meet the above requirements, I recommend you enrol to an introductory course in qualitative analysis or thoroughly read the prerequisite texts below.

Software requirements

You must be an advanced NVivo user to follow the course, meaning that you can teach the basic and advanced functions of NVivo to a colleague. You must know how to independently create nodes, relationship nodes, classifications and sets; set up a framework matrix; run text, coding and matrix queries; use see also links and annotations; and generate maps to depict data and findings. The short course WA113 Introduction to NVivo for Qualitative Data Analysis that runs before this course provides introductory knowledge to NVivo is not enough to follow this course satisfactorily.

This course is taught using NVivo 11 Pro for Windows. You must bring your laptop and run this version of NVivo or alternatively run NVivo 11 Plus. The 14-day free trial can be downloaded here. This course is unsuitable for NVivo 11 for Mac as this version is incomplete compared to Windows. You can run NVivo 11 Pro for Windows on a Mac using Apple Boot Camp or Parallels if, and only, your Mac meets the system requirements here. See the section Software and Hardware requirements below for installation instructions.