Hi I am a student in the middle of my dissertation – getting on with it, although I am struggling with the data analysis – I am doing a qualitative study using semi- structured interviews – I need to know what I need to do to put this in my data analysis without using a coding system nor computor soft ware – please help if anyone can this is hurting my head. Can I put it into common themes for eg. positive negative categories and if so what is the terminology for this – my questions relate do youth work professions – need to have a degree and if so will his help them gain mor status ?????
Dissertation – help- analyzing data?
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first what are you looking for? the purpose of your paper? do you have an inter rater ?all the data and your interpretation and the inter rater interpretation needs to be included
you can use
1. common phrases
2. common feeling
3. common resources
4. student definition of status
sounds like you have alot of data and now you need to put it into categories and develop your stats from there . I too am working on a major paper for my masters . but doing a quantitative study for my project . good luck
do you have an advisor who can help you?
A good start is to look at the answers they provided to your questions and start grouping according to themes or similar answers. You can get all high-tech with coding software but I personally prefer doing it manually as you can think about what you’re doing and sudden realisations of new themes will emerge during the process.
It might help to identify themes if you take a copy of each transcript (keep an original intact) and then chop them up so that you have all answers to the same question together. A lot of people will use the copy and paste function on the computer but I use actual prinouts of transcripts and scissors and spread them over the floor. This allows you to visually see what could group together and give you the freedom to pick up pieces of paper and try moving them to another subgroup. Of course it all depends upon how much data you have!
It’s up to you to decide what you want to call your categories and this will depend upon what you find.