Student Skill Up - Analyzing Your Dissertation’s Qualitative Data: Ensuring Design-Specific Analysis with Dr. Bloomberg

Analyzing Your Dissertation’s Qualitative Data: Ensuring Design-Specific Analysis with Dr. Linda Bloomberg 

Graduate students, as "first-time researchers," often struggle with the somewhat nebulous process of qualitative data analysis. The goal of qualitative data analysis is to make sense of large amounts of narrative information. The challenge lies in reducing raw data, identifying what is significant, and communicating the essence of what the data reveal. The typical and most frequently used qualitative analytic approach involves coding, theme identification, evaluation, and synthesis of themes with the literature, and providing trustworthy interpretations. Moreover, the analytic process should also be aligned with the selected qualitative research design to achieve what is known as “methodological congruence”. For example, classic thematic analysis is suited to case study design, whereas Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is used in a phenomenological study. Qualitative content analysis is the appropriate approach used to analyze documents, and this would occur in various designs,…