+1 862 207 3288 Political Psychology – Qualitative data analyses report
This is a 2,500 word ( i ordered only 1650 word and will write the rest myself) write-up of an analysis that you carry out on some real data. It is not expected that your project will be a full-blown qualitative study, and you will not need to analyse a lot of data. The scale and scope of the analysis is not the point: you will be marked according the care with which you have engaged with the data, clarity in how you communicate the analytic process in the report and – crucially – the consistency between your research questions, epistemology, method, analysis and conclusions.
You do not have to collect any primary data for this assignment
I chosen Former President Hosni Mubarak to be analysed, full text to be found here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/02/president-hosni-mubarak-egypt-speech
Report contents
Introduction
This will be very brief compared to what would be found in a journal article or dissertation. There is no need for a detailed review of the literature. However, the introduction should clearly state the research question(s) motivating the analysis with some justification of why it is interesting or important.
Epistemological approach
This section should explain the epistemological perspective that you are adopting with regard to the following issues:
a. Whether you consider the data as a factual account of events, a description of participants’ subjective experience, or a piece of situated language in use.
b. The assumptions about reality underlying your analysis: whether realist, relativist, etc.
c. A reflexive note on your role as a researcher: discovering something contained within the data versus actively constructing an interpretation.
Note that you need to explain these three aspects of your approach and what they mean, as well as linking them to the research question. It is not sufficient just to state that your approach is ‘social constructivist’ or whatever and move on.
Method
In this section you should not only state what kind of qualitative data analysis you are doing, but also justify its use in relation to your research question and epistemological approach. This includes referring to primary literature on the method you have chosen to explain why it is appropriate. You also need to describe the steps that were taken in analysis and explain the main concepts involved (e.g. different kinds of coding, any terminology like ‘interpretative repertoire’, etc.).
Analysis
This is where you report the actual analysis that you have carried out: for example the categories, repertoires, discourses, etc., depending on the kind of analysis you are doing. It will almost certainly be the longest section of your report (perhaps more than half of the whole assignment). Balancing the need to provide sufficient data extracts to back up your analysis one the one hand with the need to quote selectively enough to keep within the total word limit (which does include the data extracts) on the other is an important part of the task. Looking at some published qualitative studies will help you to judge where to strike the balance, as well as giving you some guidance on how to set out the analysis section.
Discussion
Like the introduction, this will be fairly short. It should revisit the research question, and summarise the main insights into the topic derived from the analysis, outstanding questions arising from these, and some kind of assessment of the value and limitations of the approach that you have taken to the topic.
FAQs ABOUT THE PROJECT REPORT
How long should the transcript/text that I analyse be?
There is no restriction on the length of the transcript. As a rough guide, a transcript of around 10 pages of more should be suitable. However, it may be possible to use a shorter text if it’s quite rich and there’s something interesting to say about it using one of the methods covered in the module. You should take this guideline very loosely. The amount of data used is expected to vary hugely from report to report.
I found an interesting interview transcript, but it is far too long to analyse for this short report. What should I do?
There are a number of options. You could select sections of the interview in which the participant talks about a particular theme or topic and concentrate your analysis on that topic. If you’re doing IPA, then one example might be to take a particular event that the interview talks about in detail and make your analysis just about how that event is experienced – in this case you will probably be taking one section within the interview. Alternatively, it might be some interesting feature of the accounts that recurs throughout the interview in relation to different topics and events, so you could focus your analysis on that. If you’re doing DA then you might focus on variation in how one particular object is constructed throughout the interview (even through many other objects are also being constructed in the same text).
Remember that a typical journal article using qualitative methods would be between 7000 and 10000 words and is sometimes based on thousands of pages of transcripts, so it is never the case that the report says everything that could be said about the data. People will often write several papers from the same dataset because there are a number of separate research questions that can be addressed. So, the kind of choices that you have to make about presenting the analysis in a short report are intrinsic part of doing qualitative research.
Does the 2500 word limit include extracts of the data?
Yes.
Does the report need an abstract?
No.
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