qualitative or quantitative research QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS
To help you with the analysis of qualitative data, it is
useful to produce an interview summary form or a focus group summary form which you complete as soon as possible after each interview or focus group has taken place.
This includes practical details about the time and
place, the participants, the duration of the interview or focus group, and details about the content. Processing the data You need to think about the data from the moment you start to collect the information.
You need to judge the value of your data, especially
that which may come from dubious sources.
As your research progresses you need to interpret the
data so that you, and others, can gain an understanding of what is going on.
Finally, you need to undertake the mechanical process
of analysing the data. QUANTITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS Computing software
If you have computing software available for you to use
you should nd this the easiest and quickest way to analyse your data.
The most common package used by social scientists at
this present time is SPSS for windows, which has become increasingly user-friendly over the last few years. Statistical techniques For those who do not have access to data analysis software, a basic knowledge of statistical techniques is needed to analyse your data.
If your goal is to describe what
you have found, all you need to do is count your responses and reproduce them. This is called a frequency count analysis. If there are any missing answers, a separate no answer category needs to be included in any frequency count table.
In the nal report, some researchers overcome this problem
by converting frequency counts to percentages which are calculated after excluding missing data.
However, percentages can be misleading if the total number
of respondents is fewer than 40. Finding a connection Often you will need to nd out if there is a connection between one variable and a number of other variables. For example, a researcher might want to nd out whether there is a connection between watching violent lms and aggressive behaviour. This is called bivariate analysis.
In multivariate analysis the researcher is interested in
exploring the connections among more than two variables. For example, a researcher might be interested in nding out whether women aged 40-50, in professional occupations, are more likely to try complementary therapies than younger, non-professional women and men from all categories.