Qualitative_data_analysis

Chapter 3
What is qualitative analysis?
You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. And—to extend the aphorism—
you can’t make an omelette without beating the eggs together. ‘Analysis’ too involves
breaking data down into bits, and then ‘beating’ the bits together. The word derives
from the prefix ‘ana’ meaning ‘above’, and the Greek root ‘lysis’ meaning ‘to break
up or dissolve’ (Bohm 1983:125 and 156). It is a process of resolving data into its
constituent components, to reveal its characteristic elements and structure. Without
analysis, we would have to rely entirely on impressions and intuitions about the data
as a whole. While our impressions and intuitions certainly have their place in
analysing data, we can also benefit from the more rigorous and logical procedures of
analysis.
Like the omelette, the result of this process of breaking down and beating together
is something quite different from what we started with. But that is not surprising,
since, after all, the aim of analysis is not just to describe our data. We want to
describe the objects or events to which our data refers. Such description forms the
bedrock of any science. And often we want to do more than describe: we want to
interpret, to explain, to understand—perhaps even to predict. We want to know
how, and why, as well as what. The way we do that is to analyse our data. In doing
so, we go beyond our initial description; and we transform our data into something
it was not.
Description lays the basis for analysis, but analysis also lays the basis for further
description. Through analysis, we can obtain a fresh view of our data. We can
progress from initial description, through the process of breaking data down into
bits, and seeing how these bits interconnect, to a new account based on our
reconceptualization of the data. We break down the data in order to classify it, and
the concepts we create or employ in classifying the data, and the connections we
make between these concepts, provide the basis of a fresh description (Figure 3.1).
The core of qualitative analysis lies in these related processes of describing
phenomena, classifying it, and seeing how our concepts interconnect. Let us look at
each of these processes in turn.