tools for data analysis in qualitative research

For example, a collection of newspaper articles or political speeches. At the simplest level, content analysis is used to evaluate patterns within a piece of content (for example, words, phrases or images) or across multiple pieces of content or sources of communication. QDA Method #1: Qualitative Content AnalysisĬontent analysis is possibly the most common and straightforward QDA method. If you’re keen to learn more about the differences between qual and quant, we’ve got a detailed post over here. Qualitative research investigates the “softer side” of things to explore and describe, while quantitative research focuses on the “hard numbers”, to measure differences between variables and the relationships between them.

Simply put, qualitative research focuses on words, descriptions, concepts or ideas – while quantitative research focuses on numbers and statistics. So, how’s that different from quantitative data, you ask? In other words, qualitative isn’t just limited to text-based data.

Qualitative data can, and often does, take the form of interview transcripts, documents and open-ended survey responses – but it can also involve the interpretation of images and videos.

Words, you guessed? Well… sometimes, yes. In other words, it’s not the stuff you measure using a fixed scale or complex statistics or mathematics. Well, qualitative data refers to pretty much any data that’s “not numbers”. To understand qualitative data analysis, we need to first understand qualitative data – so let’s take a step back and ask the question, “what exactly is qualitative data?”. What (exactly) is qualitative data analysis?

Tools for data analysis in qualitative research