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USING SOFTWARE TO ANALYZE QUALITATIVE DATA
If you have conducted a large number of focus groups or interviews with many intended
audience subsets—and are interested in analyzing results by different cultural groups, age
groups, or economic groups within the overall respondent population—you may want to
use computer software to do a comparative analysis of your results. If your results are from
only a few groups, however, computer analysis will be too time consuming to benefit your
program. Be sure to supplement computer analysis with “human” analysis, since the
strength of qualitative research is that it can uncover unexpected human reactions that
software cannot properly capture or weigh.
Before you decide to use computer software to analyze your qualitative data, assess the
following advantages and drawbacks of this type of analysis.
Advantages
• The ability to highlight sections of the transcript that are important to the project and
to eliminate “noise” or sections of the transcript that are not important to answering
your research questions (of course, a wordprocessor’s cut-and-paste functions can also
accomplish this).
• The ability to quickly access and compare information on one topic or questions
across several transcripts.
Disadvantages
• You must tape all interviews.
• It costs time and money to transcribe focus group sessions and in-depth interviews.
• Coding the transcripts is both time intensive and expensive. If more than one person
will be coding, you will need to train the coders, periodically assess intercoder reliability,
and retrain as necessary.
• While all comments on a particular topic can be gathered, they are taken out of
context in the process. Sarcasm and other tonal characterizations may be lost.
• Analysis by software will help you organize information, but will also produce
overwhelming amounts of paper.
Steps
If you decide to use software to analyze your qualitative data, follow these steps:
1. Transcribe the focus group discussions or interviews into an electronic format that can
be read by the analysis software. If you decide to use qualitative data analysis software,
check the requirements of the package you choose.
2. Develop and apply the codes you will use to organize the information in the
transcripts. A code is a word or number that represents a research objective, research
question, theory, or idea you are testing. The codes you develop will be unique to your
research. For example, if your first research question is to find out how many vaccine
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142 Communication Research Methods