Exploring the Data

Abstract

Qualitative data analysis is a fascinating and rewarding process that challenges researchers to properly engage with their material and explore it in great detail. The software will not do this for you, but it does provide a number of tools to support you in your explorative work. You can make notes and comments, record questions and ideas, highlight anything that seems important, and search for words or word combinations in texts using lexical search functions. At first, working with digitized texts may seem much like working with a physical reference book. But digital tools are far more powerful, because text passages can be linked to each other, for example, as well as to other documents, websites, images, or geographical locations. In this first phase of your analysis, you will not only get to know your material, but you will also begin to build a large network of connections, comments, ideas, and hypotheses. You can begin to explore images and video recordings, too—a task that is certainly very different from exploring textual data. Video data is multidimensional, appeals to different senses, and can affect the viewer much more potently than texts can.