Don’t get me wrong, the sentiment, the feeling, the strength
of feeling, what you don’t hear about and sometimes the
what-you-can-read-between-the-lines is all vital. If you can capture and convey
that back to a client, it can be hugely powerful. But increasingly, when I’m
running qualitative research, I’m turning at least part of it into data
Why? In part, because people ask. “They talked about
work-life balance – how many of them?” “65%” is a better answer than “most”.
And in part for my assurance, so that I can have even more confidence in my
findings. When I re-review data, I tend to find that I was mostly right on
first cut, but that a second more thorough cut produces a nugget or two of
fresh insight. So I categorise comments into topics, and then I can group
topics in themes.
And once I’ve got that, I’ve got data, and then I can
present it in nice ways. Then we’re in a world of charts, which is very much my
world. So then I might decide that
Might be better presented as
Straight away, you can see that “This” is nearly half of the
total, which you couldn’t see as clearly before.
And then this might just add that bit more clarity and ease
of access, and make it stand off the page a bit more.
The possibilities are endless, but they’re possibilities
that I love to explore. It’s a long standing ambition of mine to present back a
research project via one chart – just like my lecturer presented a
term of lectures on the Properties of Matter with reference to one chart. When
I achieve it, I’ll let you know…
