Analyzing Qualitative Data
Lazar Chapter 11.
Goal of analysis of data: unstructured data -> detailed description.
Content Analysis
Content Analysis
refers to the process of developing a representative description of text or other unstructured input.
Types of content:
- media content: content that is published.
- magazine, personal website, youtube, tiktok ...
- audience content: content you ask for.
- surveys, questionnaires...
Text Analysis
coding
Assigning categories and descriptors to blocks of text. Basically sorting parts of the text content into a set of commonly occurring categories.
Coding schemes:
- Emergent coding
- without a theory or model to guide analysis.
- A priori coding
- using a theory or model to guide analysis.
Grounded theory and emergent coding
Use this if you don't have categories to sort your text before starting.
Consists of four stages:
- Open coding
- Analyze the text and identify any interesting phenomena in the data
- Need to find terms to describe the interesting instances that emerge from the data
- In vivo code: coding categories derived from a participants vivid explanation
- Development of concepts
- Collections of codes that describe similar contents are grouped together to form higher level ‘concepts’, which can then be grouped to form ‘categories’
- Axial coding: the identification and definition of relationships between concepts
- Grouping concepts into categories
- Formation of a theory
- Aim at creating inferential and predictive statements about the phenomena recorded in the date
- We develop explicit causal connections or correlations between the concepts and categories identified in the previous stages
- Might be followed by selective coding, in which previously coded data might be revisited from the context of the emerging theory
Experimental Research
Grounded Theory