Professor Stephen Billett and Dr Anh Hai (Leah) Le presented a webinar about generating quantitative measures from qualitative data. You can watch the video recording of the webinar below, where they discuss ways of analysing and presenting data to extend and optimise its analysis and secure greater reliability and validity of research findings.
Qualitative research is often criticised as subjective, small scale, anecdotal, and/or lacking the kinds of rigour that quantitative inquiry boasts. However, when it is conducted carefully and systematically, it can be as objective, comprehensive, valid, reliable and rigorous, as any other.
Although the terms reliability and validity are traditionally associated with quantitative research, they have been increasingly seen as important concepts in qualitative research. Thus, a quantitative approach to qualitative data analysis can offer more broadly accepted processes of securing greater reliability and validity of qualitative research findings.
If sufficient quantum of data is available, this can be translated to numerical values enabling statistical analyses to identify patterns, relationships and variations across different variables. This then helps enhance the objectivity and credibility of qualitative research.
Professor Billett and Dr Le then elaborate on this approach using examples of data from three research projects.
The following questions are useful when considering quantifying the qualitative:
- Why and under what circumstances might researchers seek quantitative analyses of qualitative data?
- How can researchers utilise the categorisation of qualitative data to secure frequencies and numerical weightings (e.g., educational provisions)?
- How can open responses be augmented with numerical scales (e.g., critical incidents)?
- How can categorising qualitative data under headings permit numerical analyses (i.e., positive, negative or neutral utterances)?
- How can quantitative and qualitative data be aligned under the same framing (NVivo and SPSS outputs)?
This webinar is supported by GIER as part of our focus on a range of online, education-focused workshops to be offered throughout 2020.
Watch the video:
To stay informed of upcoming GIER events contact us using the email link to the right.
You might also consider subscribing to this blog and following us on social media.
