Planning Tool for Qualitative Data Analysis and Interpretation

By Charles Vanover and Paul Mihas

In this guest blog post Charles Vanover and Paul Mihas, the August 2021 SAGE MethodSpace Mentors in Residence, describe an intentional approach for planning for analysis. Their work is based on their book, co-edited with Johnny Saldaña, Analyzing and Interpreting Qualitative Research: After the Interview. Use the code MSPACEQ323 for a 20% discount.

Planning and organization are the foundations for successful qualitative inquiry.

Every qualitative study is a journey to the unknown. To make the journey successful, researchers must have the right tools for the job and the skill to use them well. Yes, plans may change, tools may be discarded, and unexpected landscapes might change the route of the journey, but preparation and planning make a difference when time is limited and the pressure is on.

We invite readers to fill out this tool—a series of questions—as they contemplate their data analysis plan and as they enter the increasingly analytic stages of their inquiry. The questions in the tool are intended to supplement other guides to qualitative analysis, and they work in conjunction with books such as Campbell Galman’s The Good, the Bad, and the Data, Paulus and Lester’s Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World and Saldaña’s The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers.The tool focuses on nuts-and-bolts details that can make or break a qualitative study. By charting issues in advance and visualizing how work might flow through the stages of the qualitative life cycle, we hope researchers might deeply engage with data and create more powerful and relevant findings from process of analysis.

Questions for Data Analysis and Interpretation

1. What are your questions and assumptions?

a. List your research questions at the top of the document you create from this tool and refer to them often.

b. Briefly list any key assumptions that drive the inquiry or engage in a memo to uncover what assumptions you might have.

2. What are your data?

a. If you have not yet designed your study, refer to books on qualitative research to conceptualize your research design (e.g., Charmaz, 2014; Campbell Galman, 2007; Gullion, 2016; Leavy, 2017; Rossman & Rallis, 2011; Saldaña & Omasta, 2018).

b. List the data you intend to collect or the material you have collected. You might also write a memo on how the data correspond and fit with your intended research questions.

3. Where are your data?

a. Create a set of computer directories and physical files where you might place interviews, photographs, observations, and other text and materials you will collect in the field or check to make sure the data you collected are in their place.

i. Try to anticipate important filing dilemmas. For example, do the notes you wrote during an interview go in the folder for that interview, the folder where you place observations, or in a separate folder?

b. Create a set of labels and time stamps that list key attributes of the data or check to make sure the data are labeled and filed correctly.

c. How have you backed up your content?

4. Have you processed and stored the data in accordance with the policies of your Institutional Review Board (IRB)?

a. Did your data collection efforts follow the procedures outlined in your IRB agreement, and are you giving research participants the level of confidentiality you promised?

5. How much time and money do you have to do the work?

a. When is the book, paper, report, or dissertation due? What progress reports need to be sent to whom?

i. Dissertation researchers should figure out their committee members’ timelines and procedures as well as their university’s policies. Time-to-degree requirements and dissertation credit hour registration deadlines may become important hoops to jump.

ii. Early career, tenure-track researchers should figure out when progress reports are due for their annual reviews. They might also check when published and in- press studies are due for their three-year evaluations and when portfolios are due for external letters and other steps in the process.

iii. What are the procedures for filing amendments when one of your submitted papers does go into press?

6. Did your fieldwork and analysis run on schedule? What are the consequences if things take longer than anticipated?

i. The editors recommend putting all relevant due dates into an online calendar.

ii. Does this schedule look realistic?

References

Charmaz, K. (2014). Constructing grounded theory. SAGE.

Galman, S. C. (2016). The good, the bad, and the data: Shane the lone ethnographer’s basic guide to qualitative data analysis. Routledge

Gullion, J. S. (2016). Writing ethnography. Brill Sense.

Leavy, P. (2017). Research design: Quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, arts-based, and community-based participatory research approaches. Guilford.

Paulus, T. M., & Lester, J. N. (2021). Doing qualitative research in a digital world. SAGE.

Rossman, G. B., & Rallis, S. F. (2011). Learning in the field: An introduction to qualitative research. SAGE.

Saldana, J. (2021). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. SAGE.

Saldaña, J., & Omasta, M. (2021). Qualitative research: Analyzing life. SAGE.

Vanover, C., Mihas, P., & Saldana, J. (Eds.). (2021). Analyzing and interpreting qualitative research: After the interview. SAGE