J eds Qualitative research practice. Lathlean J. Qualitative analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Science, Br Dent J ; Carrying out qualitative analysis. In Ritchie J, Lewis J eds then accompanied by a linking, separate choices at school meal times: Qualitative research practice. The discovery of grounded ings are discussed in relation to existing have. Chicago: research as in quantitative studies. Seale C. Analysing your data.
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Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Interpreting qualitative data: methods compared to the appropriate existing and therefore labour-intensive and time for analysing talk, text and interaction. It is not enough to follow a topic guide like a questionnaire, in order, from top to bottom. A qualitative interviewer must exercise judgment to decide when to probe and when to move on, when to encourage, challenge, or follow relevant leads even if they are not written in the topic guide.
By far the most important qualification in conducting qualitative fieldwork is a firm grasp of the research objectives; with this qualification, a member of the research team armed with curiosity and a topic guide can learn on the job with successful results.
Semi-structured interviews can be conducted with single participants in-depth or individual key informants or with groups focus group discussions [FGDs] or key informant groups. These interviews follow a suggested topic guide rather than a fixed questionnaire format. Topic guides typically consist of a limited number 10— 15 of broad, open-ended questions followed by bulleted points to facilitate optional probing.
The conversational back-and-forth nature of a semi-structured format puts the researcher and researched the interview participants on more equal footing than allowed by more structured formats.
Respondents, the term used in the case of quantitative questionnaire interviews, become informants in the case of individual semi-structured in-depth interviews IDIs or participants in the case of FGDs. Freedom to probe beyond initial responses enables interviewers to actively engage with the interviewee to seek clarity, openness, and depth by challenging informants to reach below layers of self-presentation and social desirability. In this respect, interviewing is sometimes compared with peeling an onion, with the first version of events accessible to the public, including survey interviewers, and deeper inner layers accessible to those who invest the time and effort to build rapport and gain trust.
The theory of the active interview suggests that all interviews involve staged social encounters where the interviewee is constantly assessing interviewer intentions and adjusting his or her responses accordingly [ 1 ]. Consequently good rapport is important for any type of interview. Survey formats give interviewers less freedom to divert from the preset script of questions and formal probes.
IDIs are conducted among informants typically selected for first-hand experience e. These are typically conducted as one-on-one face-to-face interviews two-on-one if translators are needed to maximize rapport-building and confidentiality.
Whereas IDIs tend to focus on personal experiences, context, meaning, and implications for informants, KIIs tend to steer away from personal questions in favor of expert insights or community perspectives. IDIs enable flexible sampling strategies and represent the interviewing reference standard for confidentiality, rapport, richness, and contextual detail. However, IDIs are time-and labor-intensive to collect and analyze. Because confidentiality is not a concern in KIIs, these interviews might be conducted as individual or group interviews, as required for the topic area.
FGDs are semi-structured group interviews in which six to eight participants, homogeneous with respect to a shared experience, behavior, or demographic characteristic, are guided through a topic guide by a trained moderator 6. Advice on ideal group interview size varies. The principle is to convene a group large enough to foster an open, lively discussion of the topic, and small enough to ensure all participants stay fully engaged in the process.
Over the course of discussion, the moderator is expected to pose questions, foster group participation, and probe for clarity and depth. Long a staple of market research, focus groups have become a widely used social science technique with broad applications in public health, and they are especially popular as a rapid method for assessing community norms and shared perceptions.
Focus groups have certain useful advantages during field investigations. They are highly adaptable, inexpensive to arrange and conduct, and often enjoyable for participants. Group dynamics effectively tap into collective knowledge and experience to serve as a proxy informant for the community as a whole.
They are also capable of recreating a microcosm of social norms where social, moral, and emotional dimensions of topics are allowed to emerge. Skilled moderators can also exploit the tendency of small groups to seek consensus to bring out disagreements that the participants will work to resolve in a way that can lead to deeper understanding.
There are also limitations on focus group methods. Lack of confidentiality during group interviews means they should not be used to explore personal experiences of a sensitive nature on ethical grounds. Participants may take it on themselves to volunteer such information, but moderators are generally encouraged to steer the conversation back to general observations to avoid putting pressure on other participants to disclose in a similar way. Similarly, FGDs are subject by design to strong social desirability biases.
Qualitative study designs using focus groups sometimes add individual interviews precisely to enable participants to describe personal experiences or personal views that would be difficult or inappropriate to share in a group setting.
Focus groups run the risk of producing broad but shallow analyses of issues if groups reach comfortable but superficial consensus around complex topics. This weakness can be countered by training moderators to probe effectively and challenge any consensus that sounds too simplistic or contradictory with prior knowledge. However, FGDs are surprisingly robust against the influence of strongly opinionated participants, highly adaptable, and well suited to application in study designs where systematic comparisons across different groups are called for.
Like FGDs, group KIIs rely on positive chemistry and the stimulating effects of group discussion but aim to gather expert knowledge or oversight on a particular topic rather than lived experience of embedded social actors.
Group KIIs have no minimum size requirements and can involve as few as two or three participants. The study was undertaken to guide the development of effective behavior change interventions in healthcare settings to improve IPC compliance.
Key informant interviews and focus group discussions were conducted in two governorates among cleaning staff, nursing staff, and physicians in different types of healthcare facilities. The findings highlighted social and cultural barriers to IPC compliance, enabling the IPC program to design responses.
For example,. Visualization methods have been developed as a way to enhance participation and empower interviewees relative to researchers during group data collection 7. Visualization methods involve asking participants to engage in collective problem- solving of challenges expressed through group production of maps, diagrams, or other images. For example, participants from the community might be asked to sketch a map of their community and to highlight features of relevance to the research topic e.
Body diagramming is another visualization tool in which community members are asked to depict how and where a health threat affects the human body as a way of understanding folk conceptions of health, disease, treatment, and prevention. Ensuing debate and dialogue regarding construction of images can be recorded and analyzed in conjunction with the visual image itself.
Visualization exercises were initially designed to accommodate groups the size of entire communities, but they can work equally well with smaller groups corresponding to the size of FGDs or group KIIs. Fundamental differences between qualitative and quantitative approaches to research emerge most clearly in the practice of sampling and recruitment of study participants. Qualitative samples are typically small and purposive.
In-depth interview informants are usually selected on the basis of unique characteristics or personal experiences that make them exemplary for the study, if not typical in other respects.
Key informants are selected for their unique knowledge or influence in the study domain. Focus group mobilization often seeks participants who are typical with respect to others in the community having similar exposure or shared characteristics. Often, however, participants in qualitative studies are selected because they are exceptional rather than simply representative.
Their value lies not in their generalizability but in their ability to generate insight into the key questions driving the study. Sample size determination for qualitative studies also follows a different logic than that used for probability sample surveys. For example, whereas some qualitative methods specify ideal ranges of participants that constitute a valid observation e. In theory, sample size in qualitative designs should be determined by the saturation principle , where interviews are conducted until additional interviews yield no additional insights into the topic of research 8.
Practically speaking, designing a study with a range in number of interviews is advisable for providing a level of flexibility if additional interviews are needed to reach clear conclusions. Recruitment strategies for qualitative studies typically involve some degree of participant self-selection e. Purposive selection in community settings often requires authorization from local authorities and assistance from local mobilizers before the informed consent process can begin.
Clearly specifying eligibility criteria is crucial for minimizing the tendency of study mobilizers to apply their own filters regarding who reflects the community in the best light. In addition to formal eligibility criteria, character traits e. Accommodations to personality and convenience help to ensure the small number of interviews in a typical qualitative design yields maximum value for minimum investment. This is one reason why random sampling of qualitative informants is not only unnecessary but also potentially counterproductive.
Analysis of qualitative data can be divided into four stages: data management, data condensation, data display, and drawing and verifying conclusions 9.
From the outset, developing a clear organization system for qualitative data is important. Ideally, naming conventions for original data files and subsequent analysis should be recorded in a data dictionary file that includes dates, locations, defining individual or group characteristics, interviewer characteristics, and other defining features.
Digital recordings of interviews or visualization products should be reviewed to ensure fidelity of analyzed data to original observations. If ethics agreements require that no names or identifying characteristics be recorded, all individual names must be removed from final transcriptions before analysis begins.
If data are analyzed by using textual data analysis software, maintaining careful version control over the data files is crucial, especially when multiple coders are involved. Condensing refers to the process of selecting, focusing, simplifying, and abstracting the data available at the time of the original observation, then transforming the condensed data into a data set that can be analyzed.
In qualitative research, most of the time investment required to complete a study comes after the fieldwork is complete. A single hour of taped individual interview can take a full day to transcribe and additional time to translate if necessary.
Group interviews can take even longer because of the difficulty of transcribing active group input. Each stage of data condensation involves multiple decisions that require clear rules and close supervision. A typical challenge is finding the right balance between fidelity to the rhythm and texture of original language and clarity of the translated version in the language of analysis. For example, discussions among groups with little or no education should not emerge after the transcription and translation process sounding like university graduates.
Judgment must be exercised about which terms should be translated and which terms should be kept in vernacular because there is no appropriate term in English to capture the richness of its meaning. After the initial condensation, qualitative analysis depends on how the data are displayed. Displays might range from full verbatim transcripts of interviews to bulleted summaries or distilled summaries of interview notes.
In a field setting, a useful and commonly used display format is an overview chart in which key themes or research questions are listed in rows in a word processer table or in a spreadsheet and individual informant or group entry characteristics are listed across columns.
Overview charts are useful because they allow easy, systematic comparison of results. Analyzing qualitative data is an iterative and ideally interactive process that leads to rigorous and systematic interpretation of textual or visual data. At least four common steps are involved:. Above all, qualitative data analysis requires sufficient time and immersion in the data.
Computer textual software programs can facilitate selective text retrieval and quizzing the data, but discerning patterns and arriving at conclusions can be done only by the analysts. This requirement involves intensive reading and rereading, developing codebooks and coding, discussing and debating, revising codebooks, and recoding as needed until clear patterns emerge from the data.
Although quality and depth of analysis is usually proportional to the time invested, a number of techniques, including some mentioned earlier, can be used to expedite analysis under field conditions. The most widely used software packages e. A promising development is the advent of free or low-cost Web-based services e. The start-up costs of computer-assisted analysis need to be weighed against their analytic benefits, which tend to decline with the volume and complexity of data to be analyzed.
For rapid situational analyses or small scale qualitative studies e. Qualitative methods belong to a branch of social science inquiry that emphasizes the importance of context, subjective meanings, and motivations in understanding human behavior patterns. Qualitative approaches definitionally rely on open-ended, semistructured, non-numeric strategies for asking questions and recording responses.
Conclusions are drawn from systematic visual or textual analysis involving repeated reading, coding, and organizing information into structured and emerging themes. Because textual analysis is relatively time-and skill-intensive, qualitative samples tend to be small and purposively selected to yield the maximum amount of information from the minimum amount of data collection.
Although qualitative approaches cannot provide representative or generalizable findings in a statistical sense, they can offer an unparalleled level of detail, nuance, and naturalistic insight into the chosen subject of study.
Whether or when to use qualitative methods in field epidemiology studies ultimately depends on the nature of the public health question to be answered. Qualitative approaches make sense when a study question about behavior patterns or program performance leads with why, why not , or how. Similarly, they are appropriate when the answer to the study question depends on understanding the problem from the perspective of social actors in real-life settings or when the object of study cannot be adequately captured, quantified, or categorized through a battery of closed-ended survey questions e.
Another justification for qualitative methods occurs when the topic is especially sensitive or subject to strong social desirability biases that require developing trust with the informant and persistent probing to reach the truth. Finally, qualitative methods make sense when the study question is exploratory in nature, where this approach enables the investigator the freedom and flexibility to adjust topic guides and probe beyond the original topic guides.
Given that the conditions just described probably apply more often than not in everyday field epidemiology, it might be surprising that such approaches are not incorporated more routinely into standard epidemiologic training. Part of the answer might have to do with the subjective element in qualitative sampling and analysis that seems at odds with core scientific values of objectivity. Part of it might have to do with the skill requirements for good qualitative interviewing, which are generally more difficult to find than those required for routine survey interviewing.
For the field epidemiologist unfamiliar with qualitative study design, it is important to emphasize that obtaining important insights from applying basic approaches is possible, even without a seasoned team of qualitative researchers on hand to do the work. The flexibility of qualitative methods also tends to make them forgiving with practice and persistence. Beyond the required study approvals and ethical clearances, the basic essential requirements for collecting qualitative data in field settings start with an interviewer having a strong command of the research question, basic interactive and language skills, and a healthy sense of curiosity, armed with a simple open-ended topic guide and a tape recorder or note-taker to capture the key points of the discussion.
Readily available manuals on qualitative study design, methods, and analysis can provide additional guidance to improve the quality of data collection and analysis. The application period for EIS Class of is now closed.
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