Scaling up qualitative data: with Professor Wendy Olsen

Professor Wendy Olsen, Professor of Socio-Economics, Manchester University, with Samantha Watson and John McLoughlin (with Dr Elena Zaitseva)

‘The need for a dispassionate approach to analysing mixed methods data led me to using NVIVO in combination with the British National Corpus. The latter covers varied uses of English, and we examine the prevalence of words in our own Qualitative Corpus versus the BNC. I create NVIVO nodes for each highly prevalent 'keyword' based on Touri and Koteyko (IJSRM, 18:6, 2015). Next I conduct discourse analysis by seeing how groups of these words are used together to achieve intended meanings. Using NVIVO matrix queries, I discover the extent of intertextuality for each pair of discourses. The method offers rigour, sophistication and transparency.’