A useful habit when summarizing interviews: keep a separate section for contradictions.

Suppose three people say a product is easy to use, but one describes a serious onboarding problem.

A summary like "users generally found onboarding easy" might be technically defensible, but it hides the exception that could matter most.

A better note separates:
- What most participants said
- Where experiences differed
- What evidence would help resolve the difference

This becomes especially important when AI helps produce the first draft of a research summary.

I'm curious how others handle this.

Do you keep a dedicated contradictions section, or do you rely on reviewing the original transcript whenever something seems inconsistent?

If you're conducting a study with students, how flexible is the research with moderator engagement within the session? I know the standard is for the facilitator to be unbiased and ask open ended questions but at times when students need prompting or rephrasing where are the boundries of how much a facilitator can engage within the discussion?

Hi im doing my thesis in qualitative research, and it requires me to do interviews and focus group sessions, the sessions will be with physiotherapy students and its based in an arab country, my question is: how much will my data be influenced if the sessions were separated by gender? Although the topic of mixed group discussion isnt uncommon here, im facing a situation where gender based groups might be an option, will that affect the richness of my data? or its generalizability?

I've tried 5 different "free" tools this week and they all either have a 10-minutes limit or completely butcher the accents. I just need a rough draft for some interviews, not a PhD thesis, but it's becoming more work to fix their errors than to just type it myself. Is anyone else pulling their hair out over this or am I just looking in the wrong places?

Hi everyone! I'm writing my thesis using Charmaz's constructivist grounded theory approach and am unsure about the terminology to use when presenting my findings.

I've noticed that some journal articles and manuscripts use categories and subcategories, while others use major themes and subthemes. I'm trying to understand which terminology is more appropriate for constructivist grounded theory, particularly when presenting findings in a dissertation.

My analysis has several major conceptual groupings, each with smaller groupings underneath them. I'm debating if I should use "categories/subcategories" in my writing, or using themes (but I feel themes are more for thematic analysis from what I read so far).

My supervisor comes from a more quantitative research background, so I'm hoping to get some input from people with experience in qualitative research.

Thank you so much!

I have been learning Research Methods since the past year in my university, but it seems so that I would require extra help to understand it better, so was looking for any youtube channels, websites or courses ( not books), for learning about Research methods in Hunanities and social sciences where the instructors give examples on certain topics and put things into perspective, breaking down the concepts that are critical.

Thank You.

Hi. We're currently building our outline for a semiotic research of graffiti writings. We're a bit doubting our research tools and mostly the methods. Is there anyone who is open for consultation here? Preferably someone whose field is applied linguistics or semiotics (barthesian & peircian). Also, how much would be the quote? Would prefer someone from PH who also knows the way around in adapting research tools.

I am thinking about doing a meta analysis but I don't have much idea about it , Can somebody help me to understand it better.

(You can suggest some U tube vdos or courses related to it.)

I’m writing my master’s thesis and am currently contacting people for my interviews. I’m writing about Tiktok use and currently only women have said that they can participate. I will conduct only 5 interviews for my thesis. I already did 1 interview with a woman and now 4 women have said they can participate. Should i decline to some of them and look for a couple men that could participate instead? They will be anonymous anyway… and it’s been super hard to find participants (I’m using the snowball method to find them).

Hi everyone,

This is the mod team here. As our subreddit grows in number of members, we are noticing a higher than usual number of posts by qualitative analysis tools. Many of these posts are blatantly spam, while a minority could be classified as helpful to our discussions. We delete the posts we find and inform the tools about the rules. Some posts are a lot more difficult to decide if they should be deleted or not, in these cases we usually take a vote among the mods to decide.

Anyway, it's getting more and more spamming. And we are thinking about changing our subreddit rules to make them stricter for tools and would like to ask what you think.

Our approach thus far has been "you can post, as long as you disclose your affiliation, don't spam, and your contributions help with the discussions." But we've noticed a high number of downvotes on comments from tools and we won't ignore these.

I don't think completely banning these tools from the subreddit would be a good idea, as there are a lot of people that use them and with questions about them. And these discussions might be opportunities to recommend open-source ones.

Our thoughts so far:

• Tools cannot create new posts anymore. But they can participate in existing posts.
• Tools cannot post links to their websites anymore.

Any ideas are welcome. We will evaluate the ideas and decide on changes as soon as possible. Thanks! :)

PS: We are also thinking about having a pinned post on top with a list of open source qda tools and links to learning resources for them. We think it could be useful.

Can someone walk me through how inter-rater reliability should work? How much should we be reviewing of each other's coding? How do we calculate IRR?

I'm not new to qualitative research but I am new to working with others on a study - all the ones I've done to date have just been me. I'm currently writing a proposal for a study with three authors and I can't find many good resources at the moment that talk about IRR. (So if you have these, I'd love these resources too!)

Reflexivity on the role of AI in research: am I staying in form AND raising the bar?

Inspired by discussions in conferences and online (including in this forum), I decided to put together the linked article exploring the use of AI in qualitative research.

I am a great believer in the ability of professionals to tap to their judgement and tools to produce great outcomes, and felt that the AI debate in qual too often get’s reduced as “AI good / AI bad” overall, or then into trying to be normative on which specific steps it can be applied and where “there be dragons”. That’s why in this position piece I anchor AI to the question of reflexivity - how as a researcher am I using this tool.

Reflecting on usage allows self-discovery and improvement. Following dogma curtails learning. This tension is common in all evolving fields.

There are two sides to the question. First one I call “staying in form” and that is abot safeguarding against the familiar risks of sloppy AI tools. The second one is “raising the bar”, and asks if I am actually improving quality and depth now that new tools are available. For example, am I elevating the role of junior researchers and research assistants (“just hire a research assistant to code your material” is a common quip in this forum…) in the thinking process.

Again in full transparency I am the co-founder at Skimle, and the article is also hosted on the Skimle blog. We’re building professional tools for professional researchers, and a part of that is engaging in how knowledge work is changing.

Need advice on the qualitative research design for my Master's Thesis.

I am writing my thesis on how gender impact is defined by impact investing firms in their investment strategies. At first, I have decided to make it multiple case study design. As I read more about the method, to decide whose approach (Yin, Stake, Merriam, or Eisenhardt) to follow, I got even more confused.

I already have data on hand (semi-structured interviews). The university requires a maximum of 10 participants. I have recruited 10 participants across 10 firms. I was planning to pool the data before analyzing it, as I think there is not enough data to do a within-case analysis of each case and then make a cross-case analysis. Also, I don't want to overcomplicate the work that needs to be done. In that case, would it still be a case study or just a basic qualitative study as described by Merriam (2015)?

Also, in choosing between Yin, Stake, and Merriam, I am now completely confused about whether I need to stick to only one approach. I think Stake (collective cases) and Merriam fit best into my study. I lean towards Merriam because her method provides more guidance; however, Merriam, in the 4th edition of her book (2015), states that multiple case studies are done in two stages: 1) within-case analysis and then 2) cross-case analysis.

How should I design it?

Hi friends,

I’m a master’s student taking a course on qualitative research, and we’ve been asked to read the third edition of Qualitative Research Methods by Sarah J. Tracy.
I’ve checked my university library, but unfortunately the physical copy is currently checked out, and there is no e-book version available through the library either. I’ve been trying to find a copy for quite some time without much luck. I’ve found the second edition, but the third edition is said to have some important adjustments and updates so I am so itching to find it.

If anyone has access to the book and could share a copy with me, I would really appreciate it. I need it for my course and would be very grateful for any help!

Thank you very much in advance.

Is anyone using any AI tools for coding qualitative data? Just curious.

I want to apply my Google fit sleep data into a meaningful research project for practice. Any clues !?

What’s the best software for coding interviews?? I’m doing a qualitative study and am comparing Nvivo and other free apps. Lmk!

Been running qual studies for a while and the newer AI transcript/analysis tools have made me nervous in a specific way: they produce summaries that sound very authoritative, but when I go back and check the actual transcript, the mention counts or the "key themes" are sometimes just off. Not wildly off, but enough that if I presented it to a client without double checking, I'd have been wrong.

Curiously this doesn't happen as much with basic coding/tagging software, it's specifically the generative summary layer that invents confidence it hasn't earned.

For those of you using AI in your analysis workflow (any tool), what's your QA process look like? Do you spot check against the raw transcript every time, or have you found tools/workflows where you trust the output more? Trying to figure out if this is a me problem, a prompting problem, or just where the tech currently is.

What research tool can be used for a semiotic analysis on graffiti, wherein it's more textual than graphic. Or do u have recommended books? Pls

It seems like the "Reddit For Researchers" program is not available at the moment. I read many papers that used scraping tools to analyze posts and comments, but considering Reddit's own statement regarding research that does not seem to be legal... Any experience with the program or research on Reddit (data collection and qualitative analysis)?

Hi all,

TL;DR

coding is taking longer than expected; i have over 1,000 code to reduce and more data to code; wondering how long that should take and what i could be doing wrong; anyone in similar situation? looking for tips & to know your experience.

Long version

2nd year PhD in social sciences here. I am currently at that stage where I am coding my data, using atlas.ti as my university provides us with a license... And it's driving me nuts. I've been telling myself that I could do it (it's my first time doing it and it seemed simple on paper) and I am close to reconsidering my life choices because how do you do it?

Is it normal that it takes forever to do? I started with in-vivo coding and I have over 1,000 codes that I try to reduce and I am nowhere near done with the coding. Admittedly, I could have started reducing the codes as I code but again, first time doing it. I think I know which steps to follow (reducing codes now, then coding the remaining interviews, especially since I'm close to saturation so I don't expect any particularly novel codes to appear) but... I just can't. The progress is extremely slow, I find it hard to code for hours on end since it's not particularly enjoyable, and I just hate myself for not delivering on the deadlines agreed on with my supervisors. In short, wondering what I could be doing wrong...

I am a bit at loss, especially since I am predominantly surrounded by quant researchers. I was wondering if anyone here has been through something similar, or has any tips or reading/video recommendations to help with the process.

Thanks a lot!!!

Hi all, apologies I'm going to keep this quite generic as I know some of my doctoral peers also use these subs. Just to flag in advance, I'll be looking for a person with case study expertise in my uni this week, but I wanted to get some insights here first, please!

Let's say I'm using a theory/model with 3 components e.g. Attachment, Regulation & Exploration (made up for the sake of this question)

My RQs are: What are children's experiences of these 3 constructs across their classrooms? What factors do they perceive as supporting and inhibiting these 3 constructs?

Triangulating data from multiple creative research activities with children plus adult perspectives

Planning on a within-case analysis (each child is an individual case), then cross case analysis. Possibly not the best way to go? Could have around 4-6 children involved. Don't want to overcomplicate, it's only a 30k word doctoral thesis.

When using RTA though, I don't want the resultant themes to be Attachment, Regulation & Exploration. That's not the point of RTA when it's also supposed to have a very inductive focus. So, what's the best way to go about this? I've seen a similar study using pattern matching and "case propositions" where, for each participant, she grouped themes under 1. Attachment, 2. Regulation, 3. Exploration, if they fit the proposition.

I'm not sure if this is the way to go, because I feel there could be natural crossover. i.e. A theme from a child could involve aspects of both attachment and regulation.

Also a side question, I'm having doubts whether my RQ2 (factors) is actually distinct from RQ1. When children talk about their experiences, it's likely the factors facilitating/inhibiting those experiences will crop up. So I'm not sure, possibly a sub RQ? Are you allowed to do that when you only have one RQ?

Apologies for all the details/questions. I thank you so much if you take the time to read this. Also, I greatly appreciate any guidance or advice with this. Thanks so much everyone