Lecture 9 - Qualitative

Question 1

What is qualitative research?

Answer 1

• its about trying to understand the meaning and feeling of data as oppose to trying to sum it up in a way that readily generalises and reduces to quantity and numeric concepts
• e.g. interview research

Question 2

What are the methods of analysis?

Answer 2

• content analysis
• thematic analysis
• discourse analysis
• conversation analysis
• inductive thematic analysis
• grounded theory

Question 3

Why carry out qualitative research?

Answer 3

• to get free text responses e.g. using surveys, interviews
• this allows researchers to identify meaning in individual responses, summarise complexity, generate new hypotheses and produce themes or categories that can be used to connect with other research and go into mixed method analysis = controversial

Question 4

What do Hsieh & Shannon define content analysis as?

Answer 4

• a research method for the subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns

Question 5

What are the 3 kinds of content analysis as outlined by Hsieh & Shannon?

Answer 5

1. conventional = don’t start with pre-conceived categories, use open-ended data collection
2. directed = have some prior categories in mind
3. summative = how much are certain terms used or implied (similar to linguistics)

Question 6

What is thematic analysis as defined by braun & Clarke?

Answer 6

• a method for identifying, analysing and reporting themes within data
• it organises and describes your data set in rich detail
• themes are usually more complex than categories to get rich data

Question 7

What is the process of thematic analysis?

Answer 7

1. whole team read samples and discuss themes
2. 2-3 meetings where potential codes are discussed
3. 2 raters read the whole data set + develop a coding frame (about 50 codes and themes)
4. then apply those codes independently to 20% of the data first and check how well they agreed then split the remaining data and analysed it separately = inter-rater reliability

Question 8

How to establish inter-rater reliability?

Answer 8

• 1 way to establish it is by percentage agreement = do both raters select the same code?
• problem = what if codes are very common or very uncommon = agreement could be high by chance

Question 9

What is Cohen’s kappa?

Answer 9

• a test statistic that takes into account chance agreement
• 0.6 = moderate, 0.8 = good
• use for 2 raters

Question 10

What other statistics are there to use?

Answer 10

• weighted kappa + Fleiss’ kappa = can be used for more than 2 raters
• Krippenndorff’s alpha = 3 raters or more

Question 11

What is reflexivity?

Answer 11

• an examination of ones beliefs and judgements during research
• it is important to bear in mind how your viewpoint might affect the analysis