Initial template construction
Authors of this page:Dawn Clarke and Graham R. Gibbs
Affiliation: University of Huddersfield
Date written: 29th August 2008
Updated. 5th July 2010
Learning outcomes
- Learn how to choose from the many approaches to qualitative analysis.
- Understand the value of collaboration and supervisors in getting started with coding.
- Learn the role of reflection in coming to terms with possible personal biases in coding.
Once Frances had begun to gather her data she had to decide on her approach for the data analysis. Frances undertook the interviews over a long period of time and therefore she began her analysis during the time she was still conducting interviews. This meant she was able to use some of the results of the analysis of the initial interviews to formulate additional questions for the 2nd and 3rd interviews.
It is evident that Frances was aware of the influence of her professional and personal experiences. These experiences were used to inform her analysis but her choice of method also had the potential to help her to manage potential bias. She chose to use Template Analysis for her initial data analysis. This is a phenomenonlogical approach to the analysis of interviews developed by, among others, her supervisor, Nigel King. Like many other thematic coding approaches, Template Analysis uses a code book (called a template) that lists all the codes in a hierarchichal form and then the analyst uses these to code the text. Templates are typically revised several times during analysis to reflect better the data being analysed.
This was an essential part of the data analysis process for Frances because it enabled her to understand her direction and attitude to the data, hence, once again her biases could become evident and bracketed off. Through this process there was the potential to produce data that reflected the experiences of the participants – not those of Frances- and consequently produce research outcomes that would be of value and relevant for the intended audience(s), which in this case was the medical sector.
Both Frances and her supervisor started with the same transcript, after the first reading they came back together and began to develop the template. Having two different views of the template enabled France to manage the different perspectives in the data, that is to say: her personal perspective, that of the medical profession – through her role as a health visitor - and those of the participants. In Frances' opinion this made it possible for her to produce a piece of research that was ‘whole’ because it encapsulated all of the relevant views.
However, despite the support from her supervisors Frances found herself struggling with the development of the template. She began to find herself ‘immersed’ in one way of looking at the data which was influenced by her medical background, when what she wanted to explore were the social aspects of whiplash injury. :
That Frances was doing SOME gardening is not essential. What is interesting is first, that she was thinking about her data analysis even when she was doing other things and second, her use of the metaphor of weeding to describe how she was dealing with the large amount of data. She allowed herself to move away from her research and gave herself time to think. This is an essential part of the research process and one that all researchers need to factor in when planning their research schedule.
One of the things that this reflection and distancing can do is to allow you to think more broadly and even fundamentally about the analysis. One thing Frances did was to go back to an analytic method she had rejected early on in her work. Although she still didn't adopt this approach, interpretative phenomenological analysis, she still found some interesting ideas in papers that had used the method and it enabled her to ask some more searching questions about the data she had collected.
One of the other things that I did was to go back to looking at Jonathan Smith's IPA approach which I didn’t embark on for reasons which are very clear in the first template. If I’d embarked on that all I would have seen and made sense of would have been things that I’d made sense of in the initial template, the medicalised [perspective]. So then I went back to looking at what he [Smith] did and I read one of the studies that Osbourne had done looking at pain, because there were some similarities so I was looking at how they’d approached that. So one of the things that I did start to do was to then re read [the transcripts] and think: what’s this saying to me? What is he [the participants] saying? What’s going on here? What [are the] meanings in this particular section? |
Frances was still slightly concerned about her data analysis method because it was not producing the results that she had hoped for. So she decided to go back and do further theoretical and research reviews in order to gain a deeper understanding about how she could develop her analytical approach.
The resources on this site by Graham R Gibbs, Dawn Clarke, Celia Taylor, Christina Silver and Ann Lewins are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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