Handling Qualitative Data

A Practical Guide

Lyn Richards

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529734782
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Viewing data as the heart of qualitative research, this book provides clear guidance on the steps involved in collecting and managing primary & secondary data while equipping you with a toolkit that they can apply to data in any context. In her positive and jargon-free style, the author discusses how setting up, working with, making sense of and presenting data can be a springboard into learning key research skills and reflecting on methodological issues. New to this edition:

• Ethical practice learning features, such as exercises and reflective questions

• Thoughtful guidance on the newer challenges in handling qualitative data, like data security and access to online data

• New chapters provide clear advice on communicating data to different audiences, and creating impactful data visualizations

• Online resources that illustrate how to work with data in real research projects; including a 'stepping into software' space that provides practical tips and guidance on using qualitative analysis software effectively

Part I Setting Up

ONE Setting up your project

How (and where) to start? This chapter is a guide for beginning in a good place, with confidence. It advises on ways of placing the project in relevant contexts, clarifying the research question, considering design issues and the data to be sought. It argues the need for a fit between question, data and method and the importance of thinking through the researcher’s relationship with the question and the research field. Finally, it tackles a topic rarely considered: planning how, over the project’s life, it will be communicated to others.

Starting any research project is always hard. Putting off starting is easy because of the risks of starting unprepared. This chapter is about starting well.

There are special challenges in starting a qualitative project, since it will usually require entry into other people’s social worlds. The most confronting task may be finding if the project can be done, negotiating permissions and preparing to enter what is termed the ‘research field’, the social and usually physical setting identified for this research. Entering the field involves getting accepted, learning what’s going on. If a researcher is working qualitatively it’s usually because they don’t know what will be found, so preparation is all important, as is flexibility – plans may need adjusting along the way.

The best advice is: think first, well before approaching people or sites for this research. Even riskier than putting off starting is entering the field before the goals and procedures of this project are thought out. The risks are ethical and practical. Ethical risks abound if the project starts without reflection on what is proposed and its impact on those involved; the research may harm those studied, impact their lives and damage the researcher’s reputation. Practically, if the question is not clear, or the design is not prepared, with consideration to the data needed and the ways they will be handled, the infant project can be swamped by a flood of complex, contradictory accounts of experiences that are only partially relevant to the research topic. And if there is no plan for communicating this research, participants may be offended and the project endangered.

So start by thinking first. The first stage is to set it up – rather as a basketball coach places players strategically to implement a plan. Frame the project – placing it in context, forming it, fitting the parts together, constructing them into a plausible, doable whole, so it can be clearly seen before the start.

This opening stage of a project is the most under-emphasized and often overlooked stage in qualitative work. Far too often, researchers launch a project by nominating a topic, a target population, even the number of interviews to be conducted, and assume it will just happen, as they enter (or blunder into) the research field. Projects can be doomed from the start if they are not framed at the start. Tempted to leap into the research field unprepared? Watch a basketball game, and hear the coach yell, ‘Set it up!’

The Project in Context

Thinking first requires no formal presentation, and it certainly should not produce rigid plans. Qualitative research needs flexible plans, since the goal is to learn from the data and this often requires shifting design. A fixed design confirmed in the field will be a problem if the approach has to change later and permissions have to be sought again.

What follows are suggestions for inventing the project, feeling around its context and exploring options, possibilities and processes, finding out where it would fit in the research area and how it could be firmly but flexibly designed.

These issues are not delaying the start of the project: with these steps, it is starting. As a clearer picture of a viable project is developed, it will move to a formal proposal, building on this exploratory work. Don’t fret at rules that impede starting. For most new researchers, the early stages of a project are fraught by regulations, but they all have purposes. Most are designed to rescue both researchers and researched from lack of preparation, or from approaches that are unthinking or ill-informed. While they may appear as barriers to getting going, they help the framing of the project, requiring researching its context, examining its ethical implications and presenting an acceptable design.

The Literature as Context

For all research, an essential early step is to find out what’s already known, and what studies have been done in the area. This step comes early not just because a committee has to approve it, but because this project must be informed by other studies, its research question by the answers to others’ questions and, importantly, this research design by what has been done, what it offered, and especially, what’s not yet known.

There is a substantial literature on doing a literature review (see references at the end of this chapter, and, as for any topic, do a web search for new ones). It’s too often seen as a necessary chore, a hurdle to get over before the study can commence. Resist that attitude: this is a precious chance to place the project. Consider approaching the task this way:

• Literature reviewing is a qualitative analysis task. It requires understanding unstructured text documents, distilling the important themes in them, to come up with an account of what they offer. It can be treated as a starter project, raising the issues and concepts and theories to be explored.
• Literature reviewing (like qualitative research) is detective work. How did priorities get decided? What explains how things are seen? Don’t allow the review to become merely descriptive, a list of who said what and when. Make it critical, incisive, new, challenging, even cheeky. Aim to say something surprising about what isn’t known and why, and how this project might help. (Perhaps you will become a new authority in this field.)
• Literature reviews, again like qualitative projects, are ongoing. Don’t get trapped into seeing the review as a once-off exercise prior to starting. Reviewing the literature starts the project and for the rest of the research it will continue: an overlooked paper is suddenly significant, other studies omitted a now recognized major issue, a new search is necessary to find what’s known in areas that earlier seemed not important.
• Literature reviewing is a task generously supported by a variety of computer tools (Paulus et al., 2014). Find bibliographic software, use web searches, chase discussion groups and blogs around important themes.
• If a qualitative software package will be used, consider putting the literature review into that package. It offers a safe container for summaries, reflections and explorations and a great way to learn the software. Seek out current papers or workshops on the use of the chosen qualitative software in this way. (Jump to Chapter 6 and the website on software learning.) Code the material in the literature, or interpretative notes, to start a category system. (See Chapter 5.)

The Social Context

All social research occurs in many social places, so there are many questions to ask:

• Where is the project placed, both geographically and socially? Where will you need to go and do you have the resources to get there?
• If it’s impossible to go there physically, will online data suffice for this research? (Read more about online data in Chapter 2.)
• Socially, will you be acceptable and accepted, in person or online? What must be learned and how will you prepare to be accepted?
• How can you acquire adequate understanding of the context? Is there anywhere you can unobtrusively learn, or anyone who can help you to be accepted?
• Is this a location that is accessible, practically, socially and (in both regards) ethically, for the project’s purposes? Simply asking this question may bring a reframing of the project.

If, on the other hand, you know where the project will be located, because you are already there, do some hard thinking about whether this is the best place. Researchers often propose a project where they are already – studying an issue or process in their place of work, a community they belong to, a problem they face or an experience they share. The proposal may be admirable – they know a problem that needs to be solved or strongly feel for those dealing with an issue and want to help. The proposal may also be practical – they are accepted in the area and known, people will talk to them, indeed have already offered to do so. But beware the assumption that the location is advantageous because the context is familiar. (See below for more on the relationship of you and your data.)

Purpose, Goal and Outcome

At the early stages of project proposal, it is easy to confuse the purpose of a project with its specific goals, and easy to leave out of consideration what sort of an outcome is required. These are three very different aspects of the ‘results’ aimed for. It’s time to ask: what are the purposes, the goals and what outcomes are sought?

• Purpose: Why this study? Will it illuminate some societal problem? Will it inform the literature? Will it drive policy making and decision making? Is it more generally to add to our understanding of the social world? Or – be careful here – is its purpose to justify some action or back some proposal you are committed to? Clear answers are needed, to set the context, to establish clearly where you stand, and to justify the enquiry, the intrusion on people’s lives and the time and money it will involve. Here’s a possible answer for an (imaginary) project:

Our purpose is to assist the health authority to improve child health delivery in the community.

• Goal: What question or challenge is the project trying to answer? What would be involved in answering it, and what shape might the answer have? This is a different question from the purpose. (The purpose of a game may be winning, achieving team spirit or fitness. A goal can be kicked at.) Purpose may in fact require multiple outcomes:

We are investigating for the health authority whether and how parents bypass health authority instructions for their children’s health. We expect to provide an explanation of why some parents ignore advice, in terms of parental attitudes, ideologies and beliefs.

• Outcome: What sort of an outcome would achieve that purpose, and that goal? A report for an action group or a client, a thesis for a supervisor or a string of papers for a journal, or perhaps all three? What do these (possibly diverse) recipients expect, so how will the results be shaped into reports, presentations, papers, etc.? (Chapter 12 discusses options.)

The health authority is concerned that there seem to be inefficiencies and poor targeting in this area of its health budget. The authority wants a brief report with actionable items and a half-hour audio-visual presentation for senior planners. The doctoral programme requires a dissertation, in an appropriate theoretical context. And we want to make a real contribution to what seems to us to be a most unsatisfactory literature in this area.

It is quite usual (though never required) that qualitative projects start without a firm and fixed goal. But research without a clear and honest statement of purpose is a major practical and ethical problem. And it is highly risky to start with no idea whatsoever about the sort of outcomes that would be satisfactory.

Thinking it Through

If you don’t know the purpose of this project, ask seriously, ‘Why do this?’ The question is an entirely practical one. (I don’t mean ‘How dare you do this?’, though I have been tempted to say that to researchers using intrusive methods in highly sensitive areas when there is no apparently useful purpose.) Practically, success is less likely if purpose is unclear, since it drives the project. (It will need to be stronger than ‘to get through this course’.)

Now, are there specific goals? Is there a question to answer? If so, is it answerable in an ethically acceptable project? Thinking through these issues will help the design of the project.

Think Ethics

The ethical challenges come from the first conception of a project and appear until the final report – and often for some time after. From the framing of purpose and goal, get into the habit of constantly asking ‘Is it ethical?’ This is a question that will reappear in every chapter of this book.

In most research contexts, before a project commences it requires what is usually termed approval or clearance from an ethics committee. This is not a mere irritation and the task of preparing an ethics report is not simply an obstacle to getting started. Rather, it’s a necessary first step and will inform the entire project. Having the proposal approved gives no clearance from concern about unexpected ethical implications of situations that will arise in the future.

Qualitative researchers are far more likely to impact and impede people’s lives than are researchers whose data are collected impersonally and recorded numerically. The questions are more intimate, and the methods more intrusive and building on rapport. In training qualitative interviewers, I am always aware that I teach them how to get people to say things they would not normally say to a stranger. With those skills, they can make extraordinary data. With personal contact, in-depth interviewing and ongoing participation in the lives of those studied, researchers can develop closeness and empathy, sharing experiences, offering understanding and support. Such experiences are often unwisely presented as hallmarks of inherently ethical research, whereas they may obscure major ethical problems.

The duty of a researcher requires not just early ethics clearance but ongoing vigilance. Have the participants really consented, were they really informed, will they be exposed to harm or criticism when what they have now said is later reported and are they now more exposed if the proj...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Setting Up
• ONE Setting up your project
• Two Qualitative data
• Three Data records
• Part II Working With The Data
• Four Up from the data
• Five Coding
• Six Handling ideas
• Part III Making Sense of Your Data
• Seven What are you aiming for?
• Eight Searching the data
• Nine Seeing a whole
• Part IV Telling Your Project
• Ten Getting it together
• Eleven Writing the Project Report
• Twelve Telling it
• References
• Index