I'm going to be doing some qualitative work (mixed methods overall) and, because I will be interviewing members of a community that research has not been done on before, it is mostly exploratory. I'm not looking to come up with a theory or fit anything into a model....the purpose of the qualitative work is more to understand what residents see as issues within the community and to have a rich, thick description of community residents and their thoughts/attitudes around what is happening. I was looking into just a general inductive analysis method that just uses coming up with codes and then basically 3-8 themes within the research. I'm not going into it with preconceived notions - yes, there are research objectives, but that objective is to better understand residents' thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. I don't know that GT is necessarily the right choice from what I've read and, because it is very involved with initial line by line analysis and my research is mixed methods, I think it might be limited. Then I came across thematic analysis, which in a qual research book said is quite common in health research AND for topics that haven't really been explored before, so I was thinking maybe I should lean more towards thematic analysis. Pick out the main themes that come across from interviewing community residents and what they see as the main areas of concern in the community so this can then be used to inform the final part of my PhD and the recommendations.

What does anyone else think? What would you say to use for analysis and why? Thanks! :-)

Hi Wernie, I'm just going to quote this bit from Van Manen-not because it necessarily is the best thing out or the only way to look at it but because it was helpful to me when I was looking at trying to indicate what my specfic approach would be in formalised research plan:

"Generally we can take three approaches toward uncovering or isolating themeatic aspects of a phenonemon in some text (transcript):

1 the wholistic or sententious approach;
2 the selective or highlighting approach;
3 the detailed or line by line approach.

In the wholistic reading approach we attend to the text as a whole and ask, What sententious phrase may capture the fundamental meaning or main significance of the text as a whole? We then try to express that meaning by formulating such a phrase.

In the selective reading approach we listen to or read a text several times and ask, What statement(s) or phrase(s) seem particularly essential ro revealing about the phenomenon or experience being described? These statements we then circle, underline or highlight.

In the detailed reading approach we look at every single sentence or sentence cluster and ask, What does this sentence or sentence cluster reveal about the phenomenon or experience being described.

In my Masters thesis, I took the second approach and then categorised these essential bits into emergent themes. Once I had done this with one or two different transcripts, I found that that I had six basic themes that emerged from all of the data. I then went back over my transcripts and took all of the emergent theme data out and sort of relooked at how those themes reflected the literature and also the main research questions and categories (sort of triangulated it). Though I think I will be more detailed and precise with my PhD data-will have more and the study is obviously involving quite a bit more-Masters thesis was only 25000 words-whereas this will have to be at least 80,000. So a more indepth study for sure. So I am going to be more rigorous and try to really follow a very specific approach through the experiential phenomenonological method-which also uses general inductive methods.

There are a lot of books but it is really hard to get your head around these methods at times isn't it? Hope this is somewhat helpful.

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Hi Wernie,
Welcome to the dark side of qualitative research ;-) LOL

From what you've described, I reckon phenomenology (a quick google found this: www.sld.demon.co.uk/resmethy.pdf which gives a good overview) and in particular, interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) would fit really, really nicely.

Phenomenology seeks to describe a given phenomenon from the sense/viewpoint of those perceiving it - their thoughts, and feelings. The buzzword being subjective experience. Phenomenology doesn't seek to provide a theory for how something works, it is more descriptive. IPA takes it that one step further by interpreting the themes present in your data. Bracketing is an important part - this is where the researcher 'brackets', or puts aside, any pre-conceptions or judgements about their data and what they are likely to find.

You can use a general thematic method with pure phenomenology however many researchers use IPA (I have used it myself) and found it very useful.

Hope that helps!