COMPUTER-ASSISTED ANALYSIS IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Qualitative research in the human sciences is generally carried out by analysing transcripts of interviews or other documents, which is a time-consuming task that involves a good deal of careful documentation and cross-referencing. The phenomenographic research tradition, which seeks to identify qualitatively different ways in which the members of certain populations understand or experience a phenomenon, is particularly demanding in this respect, in that analysis is not grounded in theories or hypotheses; analysis takes the form of an immersion in the material, looking for differences and similarities in understanding or experience, which continues until satisfactory categories emerge. A computer program has been developed for assisting the researcher to handle his or her qualitative data and build up an understanding of it, particularly with phenomenographic principles in mind. This is to say that the researcher can select and store extracts of documents and is able to look at them in the contexts of both the original document and the sets of potentially related extracts. The program, which runs on a Macintosh computer in a HyperCard environment, takes care of storage, thematisation, extensive note-making, and flexible cross-referencing. The program enables the researcher to analyse individual documents by selecting text extracts, to assign themes to them, to sort and shuffle them according to desired criteria, to review them in both contexts, and to produce text reports. While the program has been developed with a particular research tradition in mind, phenomenography, it is equally applicable for various other qualitative research approaches. The program has an extension that enables sequences of video film to be handled in analogous way to the text extracts, either alone if video is the prime material, or in conjunction with text extracts if it is a supplementary material.