Recursive Abstraction What Are Sources for Qualitative Data? · Interviews and group interviews · Focus groups · Qualitative questions in questionnaires · Case studies · Action research · Observations · Written narrative Decoding Your Qualitative Data When you undertake any qualitative based research, you'll end up with lots of data. · Your job as researcher is to unpick this data so that patterns and trends emerge · From these patterns/trends you will better understand problem/issue being researched · From this improved understanding you can make recommendations for future research Coding and Decoding Coding: terms you use to summarise qualitative narrative-based data so you can easily handle it by separating data into categories. E Decoding: understanding what it all means and finding hidden truth. Recursive Abstraction 1. Highlight interesting text 2. Extract highlighted text 3. Paraphrase extracted text (summarise their words into your own) 4. Group data into themes 5. Replace data with codes (low level words that encapsulate meaning in few words) 6. Check meaning 7. Look for trends and patterns