With quantitative data, you usually conduct your analysis using statistical techniques. How do you draw conclusions based on qualitative data?

There are many approaches to analyzing qualitative data, but one major approach is based around the idea of themes – recurring patterns in people’s thinking or behavior that you believe are relevant to your research question. There are two broad approaches to working with themes:

• You might start with a bunch of observations, and try to organize or group them into categories. This is often called a bottom-up approach, and we’ll be practicing this approach using affinity walls
• Or, you might start with a set of behaviors of interest (your themes), based on theory or previous research. You then go through your data looking for instances where these themes occur. This is often called a top-down approach, and we’ll be practicing this approach in the thematic coding assignment