Planning and organisationAnalysing qualitative data

If you have collected qualitative data, you will have information relating to descriptions and explanations. Sometimes qualitative data can be turned into numbers by counting the number of times something occurs in an interview or observation.

Qualitative analysis involves aiming to understand the big picture by using the data to describe the phenomenon and what this means.

Both quantitative and qualitative analyses use labelling and coding, so that similarities and differences can be seen.

A response from an unstructured interview can be coded, where the number of times a word is mentioned can be counted. However, because a researcher cannot predict what the participant is going to say in an interview, the method of coding or labelling cannot be decided on until after the interview has taken place. This is called content analysis.

Example

Content analysis could be applied to a newspaper. The following categories could be decided on and the researcher can then count the number of occurrences:

• the number of articles about celebrities
• the number of adverts
• the number of political news stories
• the number of articles about the economy
• the number of hard news articles
• the number of soft news articles