Qualitative and Quantitative Data

Quantitative analysis involves ___?____ responses or occurrences.

Qualitative analysis is concerned with interpreting the ___?___ of data, i.e. quality rather than quantity.

Qualitative researchers believe that the ___?___ methods used by psychologists do not produce results that are applicable to everyday life.

Qualitative methods emphasise ___?___ because they aim to represent the world as seen by the individual.

In order to produce subjective information, the qualitative researcher asks narrow questions that allow a respondent to answer in their own words, or observes their behaviour directly.

The data sets produced in qualitative research tend to be very small though the samples may be quite large.

The data can be examined for similarities and differences across different cases, times, events and themes, in order to construct explanations.

Discourse Analysis:

Ethnography:

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)

Coding is a process of identifying categories, ___?___ phrases or keywords that may be found in a data set.

For example, when analysing ___?___ data, the researcher identifies a number of categories, then allocates each individual observation to one of the categories

Similarly, when analysing the transcript of an interview, the researcher identifies a variety of themes, e.g. feeling upset and thinking about the future, and then works through the entire text, annotating each sen6ence of the interview.

The categories or themes are decided upon in one of two ways: Thematic analysis, a bottom-up approach, or Grounded theory, a top-down approach

Thematic analysis: Codes represent ideas and ___?___ from an existing theory or explanation. For example, the clinical characteristics of schizophrenia may be used as ___?___ to code self-descriptions from patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Grounded theory: where codes or categories emerge from the data

Grounded theory: Codes remain grounded in the __?__ ( as they have emerged from the data), rather than being generated before by ___?___views. This is popular in an area that has not been well researched or in order to ___?___ new insights.

Content Analysis: The behavioural categories can't be used to summarise the data. For example, the categories or themes may be listed, or examples of behaviour within the category may be represented using quotes from participants, or descriptions of typical behaviours in that category. It is also possible to count frequency of occurrences in each category, thus qualitative data is turned into quantitative data. Finally, a researcher may draw conclusions.

Reflexivity:

Validity

REliability

Reality