example of qualitative analysis

 In the following example, I produce an example of how to do the first 20% of the paper, along with the analysis of one of the 5 tables.  The analysis for the other tables repeats what you did for the first table.

I used more than the absolute minimum of quotes, and its probably a bit longer than the minimum too. 

You can see the video of how I produced the following analysis, here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m25vuz6i9sse7th/nvivo%202014%20part%201.mp4?dl=0

 Introduction: analyzing unstructured transcripts

When analyzing the unstructured homeless transcripts, one of the first things that became visible was the theme of decisions, such as suggesting that people become homeless through an individual decision in their life. To do hand coding, I opened in vivo, and imported the unstructured transcript. Then I double clicked on the transcript, and read through the transcript, Intel I found the theme of decisions. Then I highlighted a few passages that were examples of the theme of decisions. These is my node for decisions. One person said that homelessness is a lifestyle decision, “I think it is a decision a lot of people make themselves and especially for pan handling too. I think it is more of a lifestyle decision.”   Another quote said that homelessness occurs when people decide that they don’t want to succeed in life,

I feel that homelessness at times is based upon a person and themselves and whether or not they want to succeed in life, and whether or not they want to be homeless. Overall I feel like they can do something about it and get themselves out of homelessness; as well as having helping family members help them out.

Some people seem to suggest that the decision was being hampered by some sort of problem, such as this person who implied that drugs made it hard for people to make good decisions,  “If they are druggies or any of that, I feel like they themselves can get themselves out of that and pull themselves together to be successful in life."  Another quote elaborates on the same idea by suggesting that drugs or gambling or some other type of money problem may have caused homelessness, but still people chose to put themselves there,

                 In a lot of homeless situations, I feel like its someone in a situation who put themselves there. As in, they have  a drug problem, they have a gambling, or money spending problem. In some cases I understand that they may have a chemical imbalance in them, or some sort of mental disability that prevents them from getting the motivation to get up and go every day. This is the case in some situations, but most situations I see is people asking for drugs or money. Especially money, for drugs or alcohol. But when I try to buy them food or offer them food I already bought they don't want it. Only in a hand full of cases in my life, and I'm 25, did they want food. It's because they have a drug problem, and no one's going to tell them to be over their drug problem except for themselves.

This last quote clearly describes the idea of decisions as an overt blaming strategy – homeless people make decisions to become homeless and tried to avoid admitting it:

I dont think its right that other people blame other people for their homelessness. I believe that its their own fault. Theres always an exception to the rule, but for the most part I believe theyre homeless for a reason. That itÕs under their control.

 

In my quantitative paper, most of my tables were on homelessness, but the first table I did in my quantitative paper was on easy listening and gender.

Easy listening x gender

I completed a word frequency query on both nodes together "easy listening men" and "easy listening women". I created each of these nodes by doing a text search query for "easy listening" in the node: "music-males" and "music-females" that was already created in the nvivo file when I downloaded it, and I saved the each query output as a node. Then I ran a word frequency query, and told it to do the word frequency on both nodes combined. This allowed me to analyze the most and least common words used, in the passages that included the phrase "easy listening". You can see the tag cloud below.

This tag cloud is a graphic representation of the word frequency query. It shows that people generally talked about why they enjoyed the music (since enjoy is relatively large). The word frequency showed that the word enjoy appeared is 1.57 weighted percent. Other important term is its ability to "relax" you (.79%). "Work" was a major topic of conversation (1.09%), as was "words." (1.05%) After hand coding, this makes sense, because I noticed that people liked easy listening because they could understand the words, in contrast, they said, to genres like metal, which is a major term within these discussions. Also, I noticed when hand coding that several others talked about easy listening at work. The word mood appears as .79% weighted percent. This theme of mood was the major theme I found in the data that appeared when doing the hand coding.

After doing the hand coding of the men and women's transcripts discussing easy listening, I found that the main discussion around easy listening was why they liked it, and the most common answer was that people said it was because of its mood altering properties. A few other themes also appeared when I did my hand coding in Nvivo. To do this hand coding, I did a text search query for the theme "easy listening" within the node music-males, and music-females, and saved the output as nodes. Then I read these nodes hand coded them into new nodes of "mood," "dislike," and "don't understand"

One minor theme in the data was that some females did not understand the music. For example, one woman said, "I didn't know what they were like easy listening, Gothic, or big band. I don't know what that is." Another minor theme was that males disliked it. One male said,

Easy listening is just not much in the way of music. It's just like you kind of sit there and the music is background noise. Whereas music should be something that you listen to, to listen to.

Another male said, "sometimes, I don't want to relax; I want to listen to something aggressive, and I hate easy listening."

I was glad to see these minor themes, because they related well to the quantitative table on this topic, which showed that men are more likely than women to dislike easy listening, and that women are more likely than men to say they don't understand easy listening.

Mostly, though, the pattern in the qualitative data was around mood, and men were more likely to discuss the topic than women. Only three women mentioned mood in some way, while seven men mentioned some form of mood. People seem to like easy listening because of its ability to induce relaxation.

One woman was asked "Why do you like easy listening?" and responded simply, "It relaxes you." Another woman said,

"Easy listening is what helps me fall asleep every night."

Men, were more likely to elaborate on the utility of the music for altering their moods. One man said the mood of the music fit his life,

Interviewer: Would you say there is a specific genre you like more than the other?

Interviewee: I like R&B and easy listening the most.

Interviewer: Why would you say that?

Interviewee: The mood of the music fits mostly to my life style.

One man said "I love easy listening just simply because I love instrumentals. It just calms me down, it's nice, it's easy."  Another said, "The easy listening stuff, I enjoy that because it's relaxing, so it's something for me to just unwind with after a long day ."

Another male said his affinity toward easy listening helped him relax and it helped the time go by fast at work,

We listened to rock, classical rock, reggae, and easy listening. I pretty much listen to that now especially at work. It just really makes the day go by fast cause you know because it's easy . I don't have to worry about any cuss words coming out, and anything that's inappropriate. interviewer: does it make you feel relaxed too? interviewee: yea, it makes me feel relaxed