1. Qualitative & Quantitative Inquiry: Making Sense of the Data
Session #3
Action Research
11/27/2018
Staff Development, Evaluation & Research 2004

2. Staff Development, Evaluation & Research 2004
Agenda
Welcome
Overview
Qualitative Research
What is it?
How is it done?
Reporting Qualitative Data
Quantitative Research
Using Excel
Entering Data “Mock Survey”
Graphing – 2 Ways!
Work Time!
11/27/2018
Staff Development, Evaluation & Research 2004

3. Staff Development, Evaluation & Research 2004
Qualitative Research
Qualitative data collected from written/verbal sources
“Words”
Researcher is the “instrument”
Requires reflection, diligence
TRIANGULATION
Time consuming & tedious
Time consuming in collecting, transcribing, and coding
But it can help you find out the details that numbers won’t let you find out
Frowned upon by many in “academia” or the “hard sciences” because it is open to interpretation
11/27/2018
Staff Development, Evaluation & Research 2004

4. Qualitative Research (cont’d)
GOAL OF QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS
To identify common phrases, patterns, themes, relationships, sequences that help explain your topic of interest
Way to ensure your information is reliable and valid is to ensure you pass your “interpretations” by your participants, or have others look at the data…do they see the same things?
11/27/2018
Staff Development, Evaluation & Research 2004

5. Steps in Qualitative Analysis
Get your data together
Audit Trail (number data)
Create table
Type it on table, start applying “codes”
Keep track of “codes”
Make notes of specific examples that exemplify your “codes”
Check and recheck data
Sort data by “code”
If you don’t like this computer method, “cut and paste” information into piles (codes)
Gather all data in one place, whether it be interviews, questions from a survey, focus group data, whatever.
When you start working with your data, you want to be able to identify where it is coming from: AUDIT TRAIL! For Example, if you have 100 interviews, number each interview. You would then also number each question, or even each sentence depending on how structured you want to be. That way you will know what interview, and what page, maybe even sentence your data comes from.
Now you want to organize your data. The easiest way is to create a table. If you have your data in electronic form, you can cut and paste into the table. If not, you will have to type it out. (see table on second page)
Start thinking of “codes”: a code defines exactly what the data is “saying”
Keep track of examples that exemplify your codes (for writing report)
Keep going over your data….you will see that your “codes” might naturally clump into “themes” – Themes are overarching trends in the data. You won’t come up with the themes right away, you will have to go back and forth between codes and themes to really capture what your data is saying.
Once you get your codes in….you can sort your table by “code” (you will have all your data in one area…helps determine themes”.
You can also “cut and paste” physically into piles if this helps
11/27/2018
Staff Development, Evaluation & Research 2004

6. Looking at a Qualitative Data Table
Refer to page 2 of Qualitative Inquiry Handouts
Column 1= Audit Trail (survey number & question)
Column 2 = Theme
Column 3 = Code
Column 4 = Data
**when working on file, you would enter #1, #4, #3, #2)
You want to take a large amount of information and make sense out of it in a short amount of time/space!
Easiest way I’ve found is to identify themes, then pick some examples (using codes) that provide a good example.
Remember that each theme could have more than one code. Ex. In our example, “Optimal Time” could be a theme, and codes underneath could be:
Time of day
Time of year
Conflict with other activities
11/27/2018
Staff Development, Evaluation & Research 2004

7. Reporting on Qualitative Data
Many methods you can use, be creative!
Easiest is to define theme, then provide examples by paraphrasing, and/or providing quotes.
Each theme could have more than one code included (so you might want to give examples of each code to fully explain the theme)
11/27/2018
Staff Development, Evaluation & Research 2004