23.12.21

Analysis of an interview

Task 1. Read about interview Analysis.

It’s important that you properly analyze your interviews, but there is no single right way to perform qualitative data analysis, and the method you choose primarily depends on the actual purpose of your study. Here, we will focus on one of the most common methods for analyzing semi-structured interviews: thematic analysis. A thematic analysis strives to identify patterns of themes in the interview data. One of the advantages of thematic analysis is that it’s a flexible method which you can use both for explorative studies, where you don’t have a clear idea of what patterns you are searching for, as well as for more deductive studies, where you know exactly what you are interested in. An example of an explorative study could be conducting interviews at a technical workplace in order to obtain an understanding of the technicians’ everyday work lives, what motivates them, etc. A more deductive study could be conducting interviews at a technical workplace in order to find out how technicians use a specific technology in order to handle safety-critical situations.

No matter which type of study you are doing and for what purpose, the most important thing in your analysis is that you respect the data and try to represent your interview as honestly as possible. When you share your results with others, you should be transparent about everything in your research process, from how you recruited participants to how you performed the analysis. This will make it easier for people to trust in the validity of your results. People who don’t agree with your conclusion might be critical of your research results, but if you know that you have done everything possible to represent your participants and your research process honestly, you should have no problem defending your results.

Steps in a Thematic Analysis

“Analysis involves a constant moving back and forward between the entire data set, the coded extracts of data that you are analysing, and the analysis of the data that you are producing.”
—Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, Authors and qualitative researchers in psychology

Thematic analysis describes an iterative process as to how to go from messy data to a map of the most important themes in the data. The process contains six steps:

1. Familiarize yourself with your data.

2. Assign preliminary codes to your data in order to describe the content.

3. Search for patterns or themes in your codes across the different interviews.

4. Review themes.

5. Define and name themes.

6. Produce your report.

Task 2. Compose an interview.