Hello!

I hope to start soon with the analysis of my interviews. I have 28 interview transcripts, which I plan on analyzing with NVivo. However, I have absolutely no previous experience with qualitative data analysis! For this reason, I would really appreciate your suggestions for books that I could consult. FYI, my PhD is in criminology.

Thanks!

These two are very well respected, and accessible:

Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods Edited by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln

Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods by John Creswell

Agree with above

Hi Pixy

Well done on getting all your interviews done and transcribed. I've not used NVivo so please forgive me if this is an obvious question, but do you know what method you'll be using to analyse the data?

Honestly, no; I should figure that out, hence the need for a good book. I read about qualitative research up until designing interviews (the rest of it didn't really make sense yet, at that point). My interviews were semi-structured, in the sense that I explored a set of topics, using open-ended questions. I didn't really analyze things as I went along, but I did tweak my interview schedule a bit after I had a rough impression of some relevant themes. It's certainly not going to be discourse analysis.

Hi Pixy,

I also have used semi-structured interviews in the hope of picking out 'themes'. I have come across several analytical approaches that seem to be applicable to this type of analysis, but to date have been unable to pinpoint how they all differ! The terms I have come across (which may be of use to you) are: thematic analysis, narrative analysis and content analysis. I'm hoping that the following books will help me clarify the differences between the approaches:

- Making Sense of Qualitative Data: Complimentary Research Strategies (Coffey and Atkinson, 1996)
- Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook (Miles and Huberman, 1994)
- Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis (Lofland, 2006)

Good luck!