qualitative research - thoughts, anyone?
The best advice I was given by both Masters superviser and current one was to do transcriptions as soon as you could after the event. I ignored this advice during my Masters and decided to act on it as much as I could this time round. It made things a lot easier. At one point though, when my work got in the way I had to save up three long interviews to do all at once just before the Christmas break and it was pretty tough. If you can just start bits and pieces of transcription as soon as you can. Break when things get rough and then slip in an hour here and there, it does seem more manageable.
First time round I used an old fashioned sort of tape recorder designed for transcription and it was okay. For my doctorate, I bought a small Olympus 4gb recorder and found that recording on this and then transcribing back was really smooth. I also found listening to the tape without ear phones was preferable to using ear phones (which could give an ear ache after a while). Didn't use a foot pedal-although I've heard they are good, but the Olympus was pretty easy to reverse, store all of the data files, and to retrieve things when you wanted them.
For your analysis-you probably need to make a decision based on the nature of your research. However a good book to look at-and one that will provide excellent summaries of the main different qualitative approaches is:Creswell's Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches (3rd Ed), Sage: 2013. This is a seminal sort of text, so most libraries should be able to source it for you.
I've got Nvivo and did a crash course on it about 18 months ago but have done-am doing most of my analysis the old fashioned way just because I have gaps between doing research and my day job and forget things in-between. I loved it when doing the crash course but just don't have time to relearn computer things, especially as I have to learn computer things for work all the time, so have found that transcribing and preliminary analysis, then reading each transcript and noting themes, key statements, signature statements and anything interesting on the actual transcript, then typing all of this up into separate tables or summaries (which I will go through again for themes, has actually been quicker. I use Microsoft word to do quick theme searches (terms, etc) and have managed to pick up a host of themes-around 8-9 major themes and many minor sub themes from this process.
Finally I think, resorting back to the advice my supervising panel gave me just before Christmas-do what works for you and don't be afraid to try something, but also to dump it and go back to what works for you. Very experienced professor said 'there is nothing wrong with post it notes and coloured highlighters!'.
