Lesson 38: Qualitative Data Analysis

In a qualitative research, you analyze or study data that reflect the respondents’ thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or views about something. These are subjective data that are expressed in words, and these words serve as the unit of analysis in a qualitative type of research. You examine these subjective data to understand how related or relevant they are to your research problem or specific research questions.

You collect qualitative data through interviews, observations, or content analysis and then subject them to data analysis. In your data collecting activities, you indispensably experience a lot of things vis-a-vis the sources of data, such as their sizes, shapes, ideas, feelings, attitudes, and so on. If you record these data through verbal language or graphic means, you get to immerse yourself in a qualitative data analysis, not quantitative data analysis, for the latter deals with data expressed in numerical forms. (Layder 2013)

Qualitative data analysis is a time-consuming process. It makes you deal with data coming from wide sources of information. It is good if all the data you collected from varied sources of knowledge work favorably for your research study, but, ironically, some of these may not have strong relation to your research questions. Data analysis in a qualitative research is a rigorous act of a thematic or theoretical organization of ideas or information into a certain format that is capable of presenting groups of responses. Analyzing the data and synthesizing them based on one principal idea, theory, or pattern demand a lot of time and effort, let alone, the methodical ways you have to adhere to in presenting the results as long written discussions containing verbal or graphical explanations of your findings. (Letherby 2012; Silverman 2013; Litchman 2013)