3.9 Practicing your analysis
In this step, we will use an example from a community based research project evaluation that used thematic analysis of interview transcripts.
The project was an evaluation of a programme that used dance and fitness as a way of building young people’s skills for moving into work. It was run by an organisation called ‘Street League’ and researchers from Brunel University in London carried out the research. The evaluation aimed to find out whether there was evidence that the approach was working.
The researchers identified stakeholders to be interviewed, including:
- Managers
- Co-ordinators
- Coaches
- Young people
- Employers
As part of this, the researchers conducted 10 focus groups with 70 young people as well as 12 individual interviews.
The researchers identified three themes from their research aims that they used to identify examples in the data - these can be seen in the image below:
Figure 1: Value of Street league for participants.
So the researchers were looking for evidence of skills that the young people had developed, but they did not know beforehand what those skills were. This meant that they needed to code the interview and focus group transcripts for examples of skills that related to employability, social and personal skillsets and how they were developed.
Exercise
Read through the extracts from the interviews with young people in the downloads below. Every time you find a young person mentioning a new skill or capacity make a note of it. Create a code for the skill - a short name. Then consider whether the skills fit into any of the three themes.
Add your examples of skills (your codes) to 3 word clouds linked below:
For codes relating to employability, add them here: Employability skills For codes relating to social skills, add them here: Social skills For codes relating to personal skills, add them here: Personal skills
Now you can see how your codes compare to others’ by viewing the word cloud for each category (please note these pages will be blank until participants have entered codes):
To make the results more accessible, here is a link to the results of this exercise as a Google Sheet.
Over to you
In the forum share, were the codes you developed similar or different from other participants’? Did you find codes that did not fit into any of the themes? What were they? Could you find other patterns in the data that might lead to different themes? Reflect on the way that qualitative analysis can lead to unexpected insights - did you find anything unexpected?