computer-assisted analysis in qualitative research

Computers in Human Eehovior: Vol. 9, pp. 203-211. 1993 Printed in the U.S.A. All rights reserved.

0747.5632/‘93 $6.00 + .OO Copyright 0 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd.

Computer-Assisted Analysis in Qualitative Research

Shirley Booth

University of Gothenburg

Abstract - Qualitative research in the human sciences is generally carried out by analysing transcripts of interviews or other documents, which is a time-consuming task that involves a good deal of careful documentation and cross-referencing. The phenomenographic research tradition, which seeks to identify qualitatively different ways in which the members of certain populations understand or experience a phenomenon, is particularly demanding in this respect, in that analysis is not grounded in theories or hypotheses; analysis takes the form of an immersion in the material, looking for differences and similarities in understanding or experience, which continues until satisfactory categories emerge.

A computer program has been developed for assisting the researcher to handle his or her qualitative data and build up an understanding of it, particularly with phenomenographic principles in mind. This is to say that the researcher can select and store extracts of documents and is able to look at them in the contexts of both the original document and the sets of potentially related extracts. The program, which runs on a Macintosh computer in a HyperCard environment, takes care of storage, thematisation, extensive note-making, and flexible cross- referencing. The program enables the researcher to analyse individual documents by selecting text extracts, to assign themes to them, to sort and shuffle them according to desired criteria, to review them in both contexts, and to produce text reports. While the program has been developed with a particular research tradition in mind, phenomenography, it is equally applicable for various other qualitative research approaches.

The program has an extension that enables sequences of video film to be handled in an analogous way to the text extracts, either alone if video is the prime material, or in conjunction with text extracts if it is a supplementary material.

Qualitative research is a generic term for research in the human sciences that aims to uncover the meaning of aspects of the world for the individuals who experience them. This is a very broad statement that serves as an introduction to the research

Requests for reprints should be addressed to the author at the Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Box 1010, S-431 26 Mblndal, Sweden.

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concerns that will be taken for granted in this article. It is assumed that the qualitative researcher is involved in some branch of human science, such as humanistic psychology, education, anthropology, or the caring professions. Secondly, it is assumed that the researcher comes more or less directly into contact with the people being studied, rather than, for example, theorising at a distance or isolating some bit or bits of their behaviour and analysing measures put on these behaviours. “More or less directly” is used deliberately because a spectrum of closeness is found, varying from the participant ethnographer who undertakes to live alongside his or her research subjects to the hermeneuticist who researches experience and understanding via texts that might have been written by individuals long dead. A third assumption is that the researcher intends to find what the aspects of the world mean for the individuals by a process of collecting and analysing material that is believed to hold the key to such a discovery.

The material that can be used for qualitative research ends is manifold. By far the most common is text of some kind, but that might be interview text, written essays, diaries, observation notes, historical documents, or official protocols. Even here there is variation; interviews, for example, can be long and open monologues with the interviewer only prompting for the sake of continuity, or semistructured so-called clinical interviews in which the interviewer has a predetermined schedule but encourages the interviewee to pursue points of interest. Other forms of material include drawings and video recordings of incidents of interest.

There are many approaches to analysing the material collected for qualitative research, depending on the overall research approach. This article is mostly direct- ed to the kinds of qualitative research that seek patterns in the material - either patterns of similarity and difference or patterns of underlying structure. Such analysis inevitably begins with a thorough study of individual pieces of data in a body of data. In some cases it proceeds with some form of analytical structuring and careful annotation such that the researcher’s understanding of the data, and thus of his or her research topic, develops until satisfactory results emerge in the final stages. An alternative approach, of lesser relevance for this article, is one where the researcher starts out with a theory and a set of hypotheses that the data collected is designed to test. Then, after a similar thorough initial study the data is apportioned to categories according to the theory, and the hypotheses are duly put to the test.

THE PHENOMENOGRAPHIC RESEARCH APPROACH

Phenomenography is a qualitative research orientation developed over the past 15 years by researchers at the Department of Education and Educational Research at the University of Gothenburg (Mat-ton, 1986). Phenomenography can be said to seek qualitatively different understandings of phenomena held by the members of a selected population, or in another sense, to analyse phenomena in terms of the set of qualitatively different conceptions of them. Phenomenographers focus on uncovering people’s understanding of phenomena in the world around them, generally for educational purposes.

The most common way of collecting material for phenomenographic work is by holding open or semistructured interviews with a cross-section of the targeted population, focussed on the phenomenon or group of phenomena of interest. The subjects are offered various openings on the topic, and their lines of thought are developed as fruitfully as possible. The interviews are transcribed verbatim and the tran-

Computer-assisted analysis in qualitative research 205

scripts are the material for analysis. Alternatively, the subjects might be asked to write or talk about a phenomenon of interest, in which case their scripts are the material; or they might be asked to solve problems, or carry out some task, in which case the material consists of the researcher’s observation notes as well as discussion and the work produced.

There is not one prescribed analysis method as there is, for example, in phenomenological psychology, with which it otherwise shares some common ground. Phenomenography has developed out of a practical need for a better approach to a particular area of research, it is empirical in its nature, and different studies have led to different approaches to the analysis as well. Central to the analysis is always the aim to take the standpoint of the subject. One differentiates between the first-order perspective, from which the researcher takes a subject’s statement and measures it against some predetermined standard, and the second-order perspective, from which the researcher sees statements as reflecting the subject’s own understanding of the phenomenon in question. It is believed that however illogical and inconsistent statements and actions appear from the first-order perspective, by adopting the second- order perspective and taking the position of the subject, the researcher can find a consistent picture based on the understandings that the subject holds. Thus, the researcher must be open for alternative views of the world and its constituents, and all the time seek an interpretation of an interview that does justice to the subject.

The aim of a phenomenographic study is not, however, to describe individual cases. No phenomenographic research is based on one or two subject-interviews. The aim is rather to uncover a set of qualitatively different conceptions of a phenomenon or domain of phenomena. There again, it would be meaningless if every individual proved to have their own unique conception. The case is that study after study has shown, on empirical grounds, that all the expressed ways of understanding, or conceiving of, or experiencing a phenomenon can be subsumed under a small number of carefully defined and named descriptions, generally called cute- gories, which together reveal the conceptual structure of the phenomenon. The implication for the analysis is that the researcher is looking at all his data at the same time as he looks at a single statement. There are different contexts - the original context of the individual interview and the context of the totality of interviews. In its most general terms, the analysis can be said to consist of an immersion in the transcripts, in which the meaning of single statements or extracts of text are inter- preted both as expressions of that individual’s conception and as one among other expressions of the conception. The researcher’s understanding of the statements hovers in a state of uncertainty as he or she looks for similarities and differences in the subjects’ statements, and for further implications from the contexts. This is an essentially dialectical process - the statements, the whole interviews, the totality of interviews, all lend meaning to one another. Some researchers talk of the text “shim- mering” as one statement is seen to have implications for another - the whole is in a sort of motion, different ideas settling now here and now there. Others talk of certain statements being lifted into focus while the rest recedes into the background, and this is a continuing experience until the whole makes sense in the way desired - that is, as a set of qualitatively different categories of understanding.

While phenomenographic research brings certain particular demands to the analysis method employed, the overall approach to analysis has much in common with other branches of qualitative research. A sound and flexible organisation for material is essential, and the computer can help here, if only at the level of writing and saving all transcripts in a word processing program. The next stage of sophistica- tion might be to use the same word processing facilities to take care of pieces of

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interview transcripts together with notes on their content and relevance to the research in hand; these could later be sorted and accessed rather easily. This might even be extended to using a data base program to tabulate and sort pieces of interview material in a more rigorous form. But either of these options demands that the researcher develop his or her own work routines for handling the data, which in turn presupposes that the program and all its functions are very familiar.

The ideal is to have a computer program that is simple to use and has been designed for organising text according to the demands of the research approach being used. On the other hand, it should be formulated in such a way that it can be used flexibly and even adapted to the circumstances of particular research projects. In the sections that follow, such a program will be specified in terms of desirable attributes. Next, the program that has been developed will be described in terms of its form and function. Thirdly, some ways in which it differs from other such programs will be mentioned, and lastly, an extension to analysis of video material will be described.

TEN-POINT SPECIFICATION OF A PROGRAM FOR ASSISTANCE IN QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

Personal experience and discussion with other researchers has led to the following set of criteria for developing a program to assist in qualitative analysis in general and phenomenographic work in particular (Booth, 1990a):

1. The program should simplify the researcher’s management of transcribed interviews, while enabling the researcher to keep as close to the original data as possible.

2. The program should enable the researcher to select text extracts of interest, here called quotes, and assign some number of codes to them, here called themes.

3. The length of the codes, the theme names, should be adequate to be immediate- ly meaningful to the researcher.

4. The themes should not need to be determined before the computer-assisted analysis begins; it should be possible for them to emerge and to evolve in the course of the analysis - changed, added to, deleted, and developed as the researcher wishes.

5. The quotes selected should be saved together with the themes assigned, general information about the source of the quote, and a researcher’s note, as well as details of where in the text they originated.

6. The researcher should be able to see the quote in its original interview context. 7. The researcher should be able to “recontextualize” a quote so that it can be seen

in the context of quotes with the same or similar themes. 8. As well as the note mentioned in Point 5, which is associated with a specific

quote, there should be a facility for maintaining a series of notes on the evolu- tion of the themes themselves.

9. The basic functions of sorting, selecting, and reporting should exist with varia- tions that are useful in different stages of a study.

10. Lastly, a general desirable feature is that the program should be readily usable by the non-computer expert, or an even stronger demand is that it should be usable by those with an aversion to computers and their traditionally impenetra- ble jargon.


FOP - A HYPERCARD APPLICATION FOR ASSISTANCE WITH THE ANALYSIS OF TEXT-BASED MATERIAL

A program has been developed for phenomenographic research based on the 10 criteria stated in the previous section (Booth, 1990b). It runs on a Macintosh computer with at least 1 Mbyte of memory and preferably equipped with a hard disk, and consists of three HyperCard stacks. It has been called FOP, an acronym for first-order perspective. The purpose of this name is to remind the user that it is not an interpretative or hypothesis-testing program, but strictly at the material organisation level; it is the researcher who takes the second-order perspective and an interpretative stance.

A stack in HyperCard is analogous to a preformatted stack of file cards (Goodman, 1987). Each card has a layout that is designed to hold specific kinds of data; the cards in one stack can have one or more layouts. Individual cards in HyperCard stacks, however, can also be linked electronically to one another so that the user can quickly access related data, and sort it as desired. In addition, a card in a HyperCard stack can contain buttons that, when activated, cause programs to run. Thus, a suitably programmed HyperCard stack can enable the user to store data, to process it in various ways, to sort it, and to move around within the data set automatically.

The three stacks that comprise FOP are called the Chunks Stuck, the Quotes Stack, and the Theme Notes Stack.

The Chunks Stack contains large chunks of text, typically whole or parts of transcribed interviews, together with data on the identity of the text. The text is import- ed from text files produced from any suitable word processing program (Word 3, Word 4, MacWrite, etc.). This is the raw material for analysis, and the researcher’s first task is to produce such a stack, using functions provided within the stack.

The Quotes Stack contains extracts from the chunks, selected and transferred by the user, again using functions provided. Together with each quote there is space for a number of themes, which the researcher assigns from a list that accumulates during the analysis process. There is also data on the identity of the quote (carried over from the source chunk) and space for notes made by the researcher.

The Theme Notes Stack contains notes that the researcher might want to make on the significance of a theme in the context of a particular quote. The note can be accessed from any other quote that has the same theme assigned.

The way in which FOP is used can most simply be described through the underlying analogy of the stacks of file cards. First a researcher transcribes the material (or retypes the essays or observation protocols) and sticks them on cards, maybe breaking up the whole text into usable parts (but which in the case of FOP can be several pages long). Then they go through the texts copying significant extracts and pasting them onto new cards, which are saved in a separate box.

At some point, maybe at the time of extracting the quote or later when several have been stored, they go through them thinking about themes that the quotes have in common or that distinguish them, or simply interesting points that have been made, and the quote card is annotated with one or more theme names. At the same time, any new themes are added to a list, and wherever possible themes are chosen from this list; this ensures that the themes become more meaningful as they are seen with respect to extracts from different scripts.

The themes are very important in the sense that they eventually lead to an inte- grated description of the data, and to help further in maintaining the development

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of good and useful themes the researcher keeps yet a third stack of cards, one for each theme, and makes notes on the meaning of the theme in the context of particular quotes.

This process - selecting quotes, copying them to cards in the stack of quote cards, assigning themes, making notes on the quote card and on the theme notes cards - continues until the researcher feels the need to start looking at the data as a whole again. Then the stack of quotes can be searched, seeking those which com- ply with some ~eme-based criterion. This might lead to revision of the theme names, possibly seeing a distinction and deciding to split one theme into two or more, or realising that more than one theme name really describes the same thing, so they should be brought together under one theme name. At a later stage in the analysis, the researcher might want to extract all the cards with a particular theme or group of themes in order to work more closely on them, but in the interest of completeness they need to be copied so that a new stack of quote cards is created with a more circumscribed perspective than the original stack. Alternatively, the stack of quotes could be stepped through, and a list made of those that pertain to a set of themes.

The method described is laborious and time consuming; what is more, any thorough revision of ideas demands starting again from scratch. The ~ompute~sed ver- sion of the method, however, as incorporated in FOP, is relatively quick to get started with, because making a quote card involves only marking an extract in a chunk and clicking on a button labelled New quote. The new quote card is seen at once, with the quote in place, and to assign themes all the researcher has to do is click on a button labelled Assign themes, upon which a list of the themes accumulated so far appears on the screen; appropriate themes are chosen (or added if nec- essary), at which point the card appears as in Figure 1. By clicking the button labelled Done the researcher sees the quote card with both the quote and the assigned themes in place, as in Figure 2. Clicking Back to chunk returns him to the current chunk card, after which further extracts can be selected in the same way. When the researcher wishes to see all the quotes on one theme or a group of themes there is a button labelled review quotes OEZ a these, which displays the list of themes for the user to select those required; then the program skips automatically from one appropriate card to the next on user command.

The initial stage of selecting extracts as quotes and assigning themes is time- and laboursaving; the associated processes of sorting, sifting, reviewing, and reporting take the analysis to a level that is in practice unattainable by hand, in that access is made to relevant cards automatically and they can be copied within the limits of the storage space available. This means that various alternatives can be looked at during the analysis, and that text files containing automatically selected groups of quotes and associated data can be produced for output on paper.

FOP COMPARED WITH OTHER PROGRAMS FOR ASSISTANCE IN QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

There are other computer programs available for use in qualitative research, mostly for use on IBM and similar MS-DOS-based personal computers (Tesch, 1990). There are three things that distinguish FOP from these.

First, the use of the Macintosh family of computers makes it essentially a simpler program for the user to start using and make efficient use of; this is because of the


_ Ooma quotm rtrk -4 m m Demo quoter stack

Ieterwicrecr Subject name x cheese ?~crcr.__ Q X~tcr~icr ID c-9 Date Ouoteltock_M

aaetc x quote card Chunk stack

fi x Chunk card This ix an example of what a Quote x Themes card might look like. x dccumulatedthemes

Thetextinthirboxisthc quote, x text Welds

whichhas been selected froma Themenotesstack

chunk.Itis an example ofatext field,and can contain up to 30000charactersor~OOO lines.

TO the risht is the accumulated list of themes, with selected

i?

Figure 1. A quote card during theme assignment.

Macintosh concept, which depends on a graphics interface, while the IBM programs run in the basic DOS (disk operating system) environment, which requires the researcher to use menus of cryptic codes at all stages. For the user, this means that, throughout the FOP program, the screen looks like a well-designed file card, with boxes for text and buttons that activate programs by clicking the cursor on them.

The second difference is that, partly because of its design and partly because of HyperCard’s flexibility, FOP can accommodate a much more flexible range of

Dnmn qurrtm Wk I m w Demo auotcr stack

xatcrvicrecz Subject name CLHBB, amete _ xatcrwier ID

Q e-9 Date CbwmL ID

Om4?4? 1lcrcr:

II This is an example of what a quote card might look like. The text in this boxisthe Quote. whichhasbecn selected froma chunk.Itis anexample of a text . field.and can contain up to . 30 000 characters or 1000 . I

W-R prevquotc

Figure 2. A quote card after theme assignment.

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data. For example, a quote can be up to 2,000 lines of text, themes (which are tellingly called “codes” in other programs) can be long enough to carry a meaning, and in principle any number of themes can be attached to a quote. In addition, while text is the most obvious form of data and FOP is built up around text functions, it is possible to have drawings and diagrams in place of the quote yet still use the other functions in the usual way.

The third difference is that FOP has been designed with phenomenographic research in view; thus it is completely interactive because the users need to develop their ideas sitting in front of their material, seen on the computer screen as well as on paper. This does not, however, preclude its use in other areas of qualitative work, such as grounded theory, ethnography, phenomenological psychology, and so on, in which results emerge from the material, or even in more hypothesis-grounded analysis where categories are more or less worked out from the start.

VIDEO-FOP - A HYPERCARD APPLICATION FOR RESEARCH WITH VIDEO-BASED MATERIAL

While text-based material is by far the most common in qualitative research, video recordings of events are also used, as either prime or supplementary data. Analysis of video tapes is much more laborious than that of audio tapes because satisfactory transcription is not possible, and the process of comparing sequences of video is very difficult. The experience of and frustration of trying to analyse data collected on video tape has led to one Macintosh-based program of considerable sophistica- tion, VideoNoter (Roschelle, Pea, & Trigg, 1990). This is a specially developed computer program that enables the researcher to “mark video with textual and graphical entries that can serve as annotations to the data and indexes for retrieval,” and thus facilitate exploratory video analysis. It is “based on a general-purpose, customizable set of multimedia objects that support linking among text, graphics, coding templates and video.” It is, however, a weighty program that the authors see as a long-term effort.

FOP has therefore been extended to provide an equally useful video annotation tool by interfacing it to a Sony SLV401 tape deck via one of the Macintosh’s serial ports, with the advantage that development and upkeep are minimised because it relies on the well-understood HyperCard environment. A Sony monitor is used for high-quality video display, but any television screen or monitor could be used.

Video-FOP is identical with FOP except that it requires a Mac II or similarly powerful computer to make efficient use of its facilities, and that in addition to the three stacks already described it has a fourth stack that simply provides the video control functions. Simple buttons, which are displayed automatically at appropriate stages of use, enable the researcher to store information about video sequences as well as extracts from a transcript, themes, and notes. Then, in a way similar to text- based FOP, sequences can be viewed according to theme-based criteria. Further functions are provided for sorting the quote cards according to tape-name to make the viewing process more efficient.

Two further extensions are envisaged as built-in options. Firstly, Video-FOP currently uses the time as measured mechanically, according to revolutions of the drive spool (displayed on the VCR in time form), which affords an access accuracy of a few seconds. For certain types of work, however, greater accuracy is required, and this can be accomplished by using a more sophisticated VCR that uses digital time


codes. First it inserts the codes on the tape, and they can subsequently be used to gain access to particular frames on the tape. The accuracy thus gained is substantial. The use of such a VCR will be built in as an option to Video-FOP. Secondly, Video- FOP currently displays all HyperCard material on the computer screen and video segments on a separate monitor; it is now possible to display both sorts of data in separate windows, and this is a further built-in option that is envisaged.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, FOP is a tool developed for use in phenomenographic research, but which can easily and appropriately be used in other areas of qualitative research as well. Its Macintosh HyperCard layout makes it very easy to learn and use, and those who have used it claim it is of benefit, not only with the bookkeeping aspects of the research, but also in developing an awareness of the meaning of the interview texts that make up the bulk of the research data. Video-FOP is an extension that allows video data to be combined with, or used independently of, text data in the analysis.

Acknowledgments - The author would like to acknowledge financial support for this project from the Graduate Studies Program of the Department of Education and Educational Research at the University of Gothenburg, and personal support from colleagues who have discussed and commented on the work and given the time to try to use the programs.

REFERENCES

Booth, S. A. (1990a). FOP I. A program for use in phenomenographic research. Theoretical background and the development of a descriptive specification, Didakta 2. Gdteborg, Sweden: University of Goteborg, Department of Education and Educational Research.

Booth, S. A. (1990b). FOP II. A program for use in phenomenographic research: Implementation, with tutorial and specification, Didakta 3. Goteborg, Sweden: University of Giiteborg, Department of Education and Educational Research. (Together with the program FOP [First Order Perspective] for the HyperCard environment on the Macintosh)

Goodman, D. (1987). Z%c complete HyperCard handbook. New York: Bantam. Marton, F. (1986). Phenomenography - A research approach to investigating different understand-

ings of reality. Jour& of Thought, 21,28-49. Roschelle, J., Pea, R., & Trigg, R. (1990). VIDEONOTER: A tool for exploratory video analysis (IRL

Report No. IRL90-0021). Palo Alto, CA: The Institute for Research on Learning. Tesch, R. (1990). Qualitative research: Analysis types and software tools. London: Falmer.

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