Slide 16 of 16
Notes:
From selection of method, we eventually move to mode of analysis and here again, structure determines both what we have to analyse and what we can use in the analysis.
Imposing structure allows us to collect structured data, which, if not already in numeric form, can be converted to numbers (e.g., by coding Yes/No as 1/0). This allows us to use statistical analysis packages such as SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences).
Methods that rely upon emergent structure produce mainly text - although they can produce a mixture of text and characteristics that can be numerically coded. Text is more problematical to analyse, since statistical methods cannot be applied and you have to work with the text to identify theoretical concepts. It is then possible to use statistical techniques to determine whether the occurrence of concepts in relation to one another have some probability of being statistically associated, but the initial analysis demands either ‘pencil and paper’ methods of handling the text, or, better, using a qualitative analysis package such as Atlas.ti [A demonstration version of Atlast.ti can be found at the Web-site - http://www.atlasti.de/ ]