The questionnaire i administered a few weeks ago has finally been
completed. Out of 26 that i sent out, 19 replied. At 73%, that
represents a "very good" response rate if i'm to believe Thomas Mangionne's classification which i picked out in Bryman's Social Research Methods. The monetary incentives which i offered seemed to have worked a treat :)
Comparing the results of a qualitative questionnaire isn't as straight forward as with quantitative surveys. You can't just draw up a chart or a graph to compare the results. You have to go through each questionnaire in turn and manually pick out the important parts. I've been having a look at the sorts of methods and strategies you can apply to qualitative data analysis. There is a very thorough summary here of how to 'index' 'transcribe' and 'deconstruct' fieldwork. Some of the options include categorising and coding data. It's quite a lengthy process, and i've been finding that unless you are extremely thorough with the analysis, it's really hard to pick out themes and patterns.
My process has been:
- Print off the questionnaire results - so hard to concentrate on reading something the computer.
- Read through and highlight the relevant parts (there will be a lot of flab!)
- Write these down in a separate document and try and formulate titles
and themes for the key parts. (Trying to keep some objective distance
here is hard. Making sure that these themes and titles aren't bourne
out of prior (mis)conceptions is tricky.)
- Move onto the next respondent.
- Carry out the same process. If need be, create new themes and titles for segments of data as before. At this stage, I tried not to shoe-horn person B's quotes into a theme from Person A.
- I've got to the stage where all the questionnaires have been analysed.
The next step is to compare all the themes and try and draw more grand
themes from the whole process.
- I haven't quite got that far yet... :)
Leave a comment