Visualization
Visualizing your Results
Celebrate (briefly)
All that work! Hooray, well done!
Now the home stretch: how to make the most out of your findings and bring your data to life.
Learn interesting ways to share your findings.
Go back to your research question
First things first. Your research question - what is most important.
Also consider: Who are you showing the results? What are the key things you want that group to know?
Your primary visualization is probably your matrix or matrices – this may be enough. If not, it is a good place to start!
Know your Audience
Who are you showing the results? What are the key things you want that group to know?
Peers/colleagues
Internal to your organization
Academic community
Organizational leadership
Political leaders
Community members
Your funder/other funders
Participants in your study
Great Examples that Visualize Qualitative Research
Resources for visualization
Powerpoint – usually free, most everyone has access
Word can also do a great deal…
Tableau public – also free, some have access to a paid version
Design software, such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator. Canva is great!
More full-featured qualitative software can do some of these things
More quantitively oriented software such as R, SPSS, etc. can help with your visualization if you set up the data correctly. Get the code for the top 50 ggplot2 visualizations in R
Make your own flow diagram (Sankey): https://sankeymatic.com/
Sentiment Analysis: https://www.paralleldots.com/sentiment-analysis
Get Inspired
Ludwin, R.S. et al. (2005). Dating the 1700 Cascadia Earthquake: Great Costal Earthquakes in Native Stories. Seismological Research Letters, 76(2), 140-148. Note: Amazing visualization of results! Lisa's favorite visualization of qualitative data of all time!
Henderson, S., & Segal, E. H. (2013). Visualizing qualitative data in evaluation research. New Directions for Evaluation, 2013(139), 53-71. Access article via Wiley
Amazing blogs showing cutting-edge data visualization ideas:
Stephanie Evergreen’s (https://stephanieevergreen.com/)
Ann Emery’s (https://depictdatastudio.com/blog/)
Applied examples of data visualizations from Oregon
Davis, M.M., Gunn, R., Gowen, L.K., Miller, B.F., Green, L.A., Cohen, D.J. (2018). A qualitative study of patient experiences of care in integrated behavioral health and primary care settings: more similar than different. TBM. doi: 10.1093/tbm/ibx001
Think critically about your visualizations
Ultimately, the goal is to present findings accurately, succinctly, and in meaningful ways.
Be mindful of how you present frequencies and interpret findings.
Considerations around the use of frequencies in reporting
There is a tension in the field about quantifying qualitative data, particularly in publications.
Unlike in quantitative reporting, the denominators are not the same! Not everyone responds to every question.
Counts are misleading when reported as absolutes, but can be useful for sorting and grouping.
High frequency topics or codes can be selected for further analysis, additional coding.
Counts of presence/absence of a code or condition can be used in causal-predictive modeling or qualitative comparative analysis.
These amazing resources and tips were prepared by Dr. Adrienne Zell.
Zell, A. (2020). Qualitative data visualizations [course material]. Qualitative Methods for Health Professionals, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon.