I think it's impossible. It really is impossible to teach you qualitative analysis using a few videotape lectures because it's so difficult. Where do we need to start? What form of qualitative analysis do we need? And in order to tell you something about this, I will show you the world of qualitative analysis. And if we look at this world map we know where the continents are and we recognize it easily. And what I would like to do with you today is to flip the world map a bit and to think of different ways of looking at the world, looking at all the different forms of qualitative analysis that are out there. For statistics, it's usually fairly simple. Because you start with mean, and you do some significance testing, and you end up with regression or more complex models. But for qualitative analysis, these choices are way more difficult because there is a world out there of different methodology. There's property space analysis. Have you ever heard about property space analysis? There's framework analysis out there. Ethnography, we discussed. Conversation analysis, analytic induction, grounded theory, AMOR methodology, phenomenology and many, many others. So, what to choose? How to organize this? What to do in one week? Well, in this course I will try to teach you something about framework analysis. I will try to teach you something about content analysis. I will try to teach you something about grounded theory, about analytic induction. But it means that many other parts of the world are left out. It means that decision has been made to skip property space analysis, to skip qualitative comparative analysis, to skip narrative analysis, or IPA. But I have tried to organize the world a bit to make you look at the map in a little different way. For instance, we can organize the world of qualitative analysis with methodologies that are based on coding, or at least coding does take place in those methodologies. Whereas there's another group of methodologies that is focusing a lot more on interpretation. And some would even say that coding is impossible, or very bad. But we can also organize the world different again. For instance, the interpretive methodologies and the sequential methodologies. Meaning, with this part of the world data is gathered first, collected first, and then analyzed. Whereas in this part of the world, it's an iterative process. It's going back and forth between theory and data, data and theory. Data, reflections, memos, data collection, and so on and so forth. We can also arrange the world differently again. For instance, like this, more deductive approaches and more inductive approaches. This doesn't mean that these methodologies are always inductive. It also doesn't mean that these methodologies are always deductive. Very often a theme analysis starts out inductively, and then ends up more deductive. So we can look at the world in three ways, the world of qualitative methodologies, inductive or deductive, sequential, or iterative, or coding versus interpretation. But all methodologies use three aspects. And those are the three aspects, described by Wolcott, but based on classical phenomenology because all methodologies need description. All methodologies need analysis and all methodologies need interpretation. And some are relying a bit more on analysis, whereas others are relying a bit more on description. But they all use all three. So every method you are going to use in qualitative research consist of description, analysis and interpretation.
