INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods

Admin Syllabus changed around a bit Guest speakers scheduled

The Iterative Model1) research topic/questions

2) ‘corpus construction’

3) data gathering

4) analysis

5) write-up

4) more analysis

Field work

1) Initial coding

2) focused coding

3) theoretical coding

4) memo-writing

5) draft writing

From Analysis to Write up

Gra

nula

rity

Grounded Theory Constructing analytic codes and categories

from data Simultaneous involvement in data collection

and analysis ‘Sampling’ aimed toward theory construction Lit review after analysis

Grounded Theory, e.g.

Coding… …is attaching labels to segments of data

that depict what each segment is about …is the bones of your analysis …forces you to interact with your data

(again and again)

Coding: Key concepts Granularity varies

Word-by-word, line-by-line, incident-to-incident

observational data vs. interviews Ideas, categories, concepts must

‘earn their way’ into your analysis ‘in vivo’ codes (attention to language) Constant comparative method Are provisional!

Warning! Be careful with the language of

intention, motivation, strategy Don’t impute Treat social reality as what is apparent,

presented to you (not underlying, secret motives)

What does coding do to data? Condenses Disaggregates

1) Initial coding

Remain open Stay close to the data Keep codes simple and precise Construct short codes Preserve actions [gerunds – i.e. shifting,

interpreting, avoiding, predicting] Compare data with data Move quickly through the data

Take most frequent codes from the initial coding

tying emerging concepts to the data (verification process)

2) focused coding

1) Initial coding

After Coding: Some Heuristics Sorting and

DiagrammingConcept chartingFlow diagrams

Lofland and Lofland and Charmaz have many suggestions

Memo-Writing Transitioning

between codes and write up

Could be blog entries

Timesavers and Shortcuts Moving along quickly to ‘focused coding’ Do ‘initial’ coding on a selection of the data

(the early data, the most rich material) Software (for searching especially) – NVivo

or even MS OneNote