"One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it... Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource."

- Peter Druckerhttp://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/peter_f._drucker/4.html

BAM201 Research Skills

Session 7Analysing qualitative data, and

research ethics

Business and Management

Agenda

• Data analysis

• Research ethics

Rights

What does it mean to say you have a right?

Rights

• Whyte’s assumptions are:

1. Rights entail duties, eg…• The right to life imposes a duty

on others not to kill me.

• The right to free speech imposes a duty on others not to shout me down or ban my publications.

Whyte, J. (2003) Bad Thoughts: a guide to clear thinking.

Rights

• Whyte’s assumptions are:2. The most plausible duty that

others may have, if you are to have a right to your opinion, is the duty to let you keep your opinion.

Rights

• Whyte’s assumptions are:

3. No one has a duty to allow you to keep your opinion.– When your opinion is that it’s safe to

cross the road, but I have some information you don’t have and know it’s unsafe, then I should try to change your opinion.

Rights

• Whyte’s conclusion is:

– You do not have a right to your opinion.– And this conclusion seems to

follow logically.

What other duties did Whyte consider?

• Your right to your opinion means:– I have to agree with you.

– I have to listen to you.

• Can you think of any other possibilities?

Whyte’s argument

• Notice that Whyte needs to find only one case that falsifies the claim that I have a duty to let your keep your opinion.

• But we could still refute his argument if we could think of some other duty I have in connection with your opinion.

What rights do people who contribute data to your research have?

Ethical principles

• Voluntary participation

• Informed consent

• Avoidance of risk of harm

• Confidentiality

Drawn from: http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/kb/ethics.htm

Ethical principles from The Market Research Society 1

• Respondents shall be honestly and

comprehensively informed about the

qualitative research in which they are taking

part.

• Respondents shall openly be asked to give

their consent to take part and to any

subsequent attributable use of their

comments (and any other material arising

from the group/interview).

MRS Code & Guidelines: qualitative research guidelines

Ethical principles from The Market Research Society 2

• Undertakings made to respondents shall be

honoured.

• The research shall respect the interests of

clients.

• Respondents shall be treated with respect

at all times.

• The rights of respondents shall be

paramount.

MRS Code & Guidelines: qualitative research guidelines

Qualitative data

• Generated from interviews, focus groups, written answers and documents.

• There may be a lot of data.

• Data from different participants in your research may seem to vary in form, quantity, style etc.

• It might seem that such data will be difficult to analyse – even baffling.

Qualitative data

• Especially as we want our analysis to be rigorous!

• We want other people to be able to see clearly how we’ve analysed the data.

• Ideally, if another researcher were to follow your method of analysing the data they would reach the same conclusions.

Content analysis

• To analyse something means to identify its component parts

• We need to identify the component parts of our transcript– Words?

– Sentences?

– These would be syntactical units, based on our knowledge of syntax

Content analysis

• We need to identify the component parts of our transcript– Propositions? (Propositional units)

– A proposition is a statement that has the property that it can be true or false

– Themes? (Thematic units)

Content analysis

• Having divided up our transcript into units of content (unitised our transcript) we now have a bunch of units of content from which we may take a sample

• So these units of content are sometimes called sampling units

Content analysis

• In some circumstances we might take a random sample of these sampling units to analyse further

• For example, the sampling units could be newspaper editorials published in The Independent since 1995 and we could take a random sample of these to analyse in detail

Content analysis

• In our circumstances we will wish to identify a subset of the sampling units that are of interest to us.

• For example, if the sampling units are words then we might want to focus on words that convey something about workers’ motivational states

Content analysis

• Our analysis could then be simply quantitative– Count the number of times such

words are used by research participants

– We would probably need to list the words that will count as conveying something about workers’ motivational states

Content analysis

• Coding frame

– List of codes presented vertically

so that analysis can be

conducted in horizontal rows

Example

Coding unit (words) Count

Price II

Quality III

Taste I

Fresh

Content analysis

• Coding units

– Words

– Phrases

– Themes, eg trust

– Items, eg newspaper articles

Example 2

Coding unit (themes) Analysis

Money X said she only worked for the money (line 1)

Time

Boredom Y said she was often bored at work (line 38)

Family X said her family was priority (line 19); Y said she missed work if child was unwell (line 11)

A reminder…

• If your data is boring then no amount of careful analysis will reveal anything interesting

• You must get your research subjects to talk openly about something interesting at the data collection stage!

Directed tasks1. Review your work in session 7 on the

analysis of qualitative data

2. Complete a satisfactory PID for your research for the BAM201 assessment

3. Start planning and conducting your data collection (note the importance of planning in detail and having an excellent discussion guide with key themes/questions and prompts