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Analyzing Qualitative Data: Methods and Critiques

Learn the intricacies of qualitative data analysis including organizing, synthesizing, and theorizing the data. Understand how to critique research based on theoretical, methodological, ethical, interpretative, and stylistic dimensions. Discover the importance of research utilization.

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Analyzing Qualitative Data: Methods and Critiques

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  1. Analyzing Qualitative Data

  2. It is a labor intensive activity that requires creativity, conceptual sensitivity and hard work. • It does not proceed in a linear fashion.

  3. Purpose: • To organize, provide structure to and elicit meaning from research data. • It is a challenge for qualitative researchers for 3 reasons: • There are NO systematic rules for analyzing and presenting qualitative data. • The enormous amount of work required to organize and make sense of pages and pages of narrative materials • The reduction of the data for reporting purposes. Using Excerpts from narrative materials

  4. Qualitative analysis process • Comprehending- to learn what is going on and make sense of data • Synthesizing: sifting the data. Putting pieces together and make some generalized statements about the phenomenon, • Theorizing: systematic sorting of the data • Recontextualizing: further development of the theory such as its applicability to other settings and groups

  5. Managing and organizing data: • Categorization scheme • Coding qualitative data. • Manual methods of organizing qualitative data. • Computer programs for managing qualitative data.

  6. Analytic Procedures • Search for themes or recurring regularities • Themes are used to provide a full description of the experience • Researcher returns the description to its original sources for confirmation of validity

  7. Research Critique • Research critique is a careful appraisal of its merits and flaws. • The functions of a critique are not to hunt dogmatically for and expose mistakes. • A good critique objectively identifies areas of adequacy and inadequacy, virtues as well as faults. • A critique should reflect a thoughtful, objective and balanced consideration of the study’s validity and significance.

  8. Elements of a research critique: • 1. Substantive theoretical dimension: • Significance of the problem • Sound conceptualization, theoretical framework. • Congruence between the study question and the methods used to address it • Is the research problem placed into a larger theoretical context?

  9. In quantitative research: • 2. Methodological dimensions: • 4 major decisions are taken by the researcher dealing with: • Decision 1: Research design – what design will yield the most unambiguous and meaningful result about the relationship between the independent and dependent variables • Decision 2: research Sample- who, what, characteristics of the population, how large, from where and what sampling approach should be used

  10. Decision 3: Data collection- How should data be gathered, how variables can be operational zed and reliability and validity be measured • Decision 4: Data analysis- what statistical analysis to be used

  11. In qualitative studies: • Decision 1: Setting – what setting yields richest information • Decision 2: Data collection – sources of data? How to be gathered, single or multiple sources? • Decision 3: Sample – who, how to select the participants, how many, how long? • Decision 4: Data quality- Evidence to support credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability of data? The analysis and interpretation?

  12. 3. Ethical dimension, ethical violations. • 4. Interpretative dimension: Reports conclude with a discussion, conclusion or implications section. Does it fail to point out the limitations? i.e. the sampling deficiencies, practical constraints, data quality problems and so on.

  13. 5. Presentation and stylistic dimensions: • Sufficient information about the study purpose, conceptual framework, design and methods, handling ethical issues, analysis and interpretations? • Well written? Grammatical? • Well organized, logical presentation? • Concise, are important details omitted? • Suggest overt biases? • Language? Disciplined inquiry • Sexist language? • Abstract, title

  14. A research report must consist of: a. Abstract b. Introduction (problem, hypotheses, purpose, and theoretical background c. Literature review, theoretical background d. Methods, population of the study, data collection methods, sampling e. Analysis, findings f. Discussion of findings g. Bibliography and references h. Indexes

  15. Research Utilization • Definition: the use of findings from a disciplined study or set of studies in a practical application that is unrelated to the original research

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