Managing primary data

Audio transcript

"How would you go about pulling out the themes or the points from the data that you are looking for?

It requires a lot of reading - reading and re-reading, or listening to the transcripts of that data. And listening to what people are saying and how they are saying it, and what they emphasise within the data itself. You really become so familiar with what you're reading and hearing so that when I get to sorting I'm hearing what the person is saying, and I'm identifying excerpts out of that data that I'll pull out. It's a form of coding. And then I'll pull all of the data that might fit that one code, and I'll go through all the transcripts and look for more information that will fit that code, and I sort it out by using NuDIST or copying and cutting it in a word document.

Then I look at what is in the coding data, and sort that into concepts, so I try and aggregate it together.

And then when I've got the concepts together or categories together, then I'm looking for a thematic "thing" that emerges from the data. It's very difficult to explain that, because it's such an intuitive thing. Where sometimes I might look at the data it's quite obvious that there is a relationship - all human beings respond to a particular thing - I might look at another piece of data and to me an analogy pops up, and one of the analogies I used in my sorting of data into themes not too long ago, was looking at 'how individuals developed as professionals' and what the participants were describing to me sounded like 'passages through different doorways'. And the trials and tribulations and the experiences they had in their transition, equated to different sorts of doorways. And that's how I ended up with my themes, just using analogy."

Associate Dean (Teaching&Learning) Arts, Health & Sciences