Order 1000984: Part 3: The Analysis and Interpretation of Qualitative Data

           

     

           

       

                                                 

             

                                         

                                       

                                                           

                                                 

                                                     

           

                                               

                                             

                                             

                         

                                                   

                                                     

                                                 

                                                                     

                                                   

                                                             

Visualizing Data with WORD or EXCEL

Visualizing  Data with  WORD or EXCEL Program Transcript

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SUSAN MARCUS: Hi. This  is  Dr. Susan Marcus. And in this  video, we'll be covering how to take the data that you coded and move it into categories  and themes  for   presentation in visual and descriptive forms.

This  document contains  all of the coding work  that we've done-­-­ our  first cycle descriptive codes, our  first cycle concept codes, and our  second cycle pattern codes. We take each column of codes  and put them  into a Word document one right after  the other. So it looks  like this.

So here we are in this  document where we have a list of all of our  individual codes. And as  a qualitative researcher, before you proceed, you want to check  to make sure with your  memo notes  and your  Excel spreadsheets  that the meaning of each of these codes   is  clear  to you. Once you do that, then you spend some time reading through each of the codes. Again, checking to see that you understand, you recall, how you came to that particular  code, and if it actually  reflects  what the interviewee said when you were coding that bit of information.

Once that's done, you'll start to see some commonalities  among those different codes. So for  example, as  I'm scrolling through, I see that several of the codes  are about doing something for  others. So I'll use the Highlighting tool to identify  codes  that talk  about how other  people are affected or  the intention to connect or  do something for  others.

So some of these I'm being a bit elastic  in my  thinking. And I would check  here "at my   child's school."  That's certainly  about helping others. But I would go back  and check  to make sure that what I'm interpreting is, in fact, connected to the data.

And you see how I am  looking up and down and just checking to see is  there anything else. Here's another  one, "helping others."  So of all these lists  of codes, this  has  the potential to be a category  or  a theme. And I would go through the list several times  and see if I could come up similar  groupings  of categories  that may  reflect different themes.

So what I have here on this  document is  the result of going through that process  and looking through that list over  and over  again and referring again back  to my  coding sheets  and even back  to the transcripts  in order  to come up with these themes, which summarize what our  interviewees  say  about the meaning of social change as  graduate students  at Walden University. So here, you can now see that in the beginning, we moved away  from  what we were trying to identify  or  enquire into. And now as  we come back  to the analysis  of the data to identify  themes, we now think  about, so what are we trying to do in the first place? And that is, exploring the concept of social change. And these are the themes  that came out-­-­ a focus  on the other, focus  on local, responding to

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Visualizing Data with WORD or EXCEL

specific  needs, how it begins  with a single person, it incorporates  the education of self as  the object of change, and benefit to the self.

Now, this  is  a very  interesting list. And when you put this  into your  document as  part of your  results  section, you'll be able to define and describe each of these themes based on the categories  and the interview transcript quotes. So that gets  explained in the context of the results.

The other  thing that you can do to make the results  more interesting is  to create a visual display. And this  is  relatively  straightforward to do in Word. So I go to the SmartArt tab. And you can see here that there are lots  of different ways  to display  data.

I'm going to choose the Relationship tab. And create a little visual. And now I can take the content, the names  of the themes  and the title of the theme, and put it into the graphic  image. And then just add in the names  of the themes  into the text box. And at the end, you get something like this.

By putting the names  of the themes, the words  of the themes, into a visual format, it gives  the reader  another  way  to understand how the concepts  that you identified in your   data analysis  relate to each other. You know the saying, "a picture is  worth a thousand words,"  so that you can see from  the diagram  how all of these concepts, of these themes, relate to the notion of social change, to the experience of social change. So it's more evocative than looking at a simple list.

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